


Sun, Sand, and Stone

by Black_Eyed_Suzannah_Q



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: (Yes like that...and that), Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Angst, Badass Survivor!Rey, Competence Porn, Enemies to Allies To Lovers, Eventual Smut, Everybody's Thirsty, Everything's Trying to Kill You, F/M, Mad Max Vibes, Military!Kylo, Shamelessly Reappropriated Dialogue, Slow Burn, Snakessss, Watch Your Step, the smut has arrived
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-07-15
Packaged: 2019-04-16 07:30:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 21
Words: 85,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14159823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Black_Eyed_Suzannah_Q/pseuds/Black_Eyed_Suzannah_Q
Summary: Rey’s Apocalypse Survival Guide:1. Find a water supply, and fight to keep it.2. Treat anything that moves as either food or a threat. (Sometimes both.)3. Keep well away from other survivors.4. Don’t get captured by a rogue paramilitary group.5. Anddefinitelydon’t fuck Kylo Ren after he interrogates you, then inexplicably saves your life.Or maybe…do. At the end of the world, rules are more like suggestions, anyhow.And Rey's getting less certain about #5 by the day.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Here we go, folks! I'm hoping to update this brain-nonsense biweekly, so stay tuned for more desert rubbish...
> 
> The marvelous Selunchen drew a [scene](https://selunchen.tumblr.com/post/184056278742/clara-gemm-hey-draw-something-for-sun-sand) from this chapter, and I'm just darn delighted!

Rey has learned stillness.

Not the stillness of fear, of deer caught in a hunter’s light and staring down the barrel of a rifle, frozen. No. She is still with disappearing, with watching, with waiting to strike. She can’t move—there’s nowhere to hide in this tawny, barren landscape, stillness her only concealment—and so she ignores a sudden cold pouring across the desert as an angry orange sun sets in spectacular, awful spendor. Heavy spirals of dust in the air give it these colors. Indigo. Vermillion. Gold. Even a green so lovely it makes her ache.

Fall-out.

Pollution.

She hates the beauty. She hates the cold when the sun’s gone, because it makes her shiver. And she can’t shiver. Not exposed like she is. Her clothes are damp with sweat from watching through the day, when temperatures soared to boiling and sand beneath her feet seared through her boots’ leather soles when she crouched close to the ground, skin reddening with shimmering waves of heat. Her body had struggled to cool itself with waking precious water on her skin—a futile, useless response. She’s clammy now, struggling against the feverish change from heat to chill, against the shivering.

She won’t shiver.

She can’t.

Not if she wants to survive.

And she wants to survive. She’s always survived.

Before, it was easier. Greasy pizza boxes from dumpsters, congealing cheese rich in fats; she’d scraped it off the cardboard bottoms. Sometimes even crusts left over. Snatching mutant produce that idle rich people ordered to their doors and didn’t bring inside until morning, feeling smug about taking in unwanted vegetables rejected from supermarkets, like they had compassion for a forked carrot or weird, dimpled oranges, but not people like her. She’d taken what she needed. Calories to keep her going.

She didn’t like stealing, back then. Not really. Back when there was such a thing as theft. Her mouth makes a bitter twitch. Cold sweat stings the cracks in her lips. She doesn’t wipe it away.

_Before. Back then_. Words for what can’t be described. The world—ending. Ending so slowly, she’d hardly noticed it happening.

Until the competition. That’s when she knew.

Yes, she’s got competition for her scavenged resources, now. These days, no one in their right mind would throw away a pizza box. There aren’t anymore vegetables. Hardly any plants, and none to eat out here—even if she could pick off their spines. Trickles of gasoline. And water. So little water.

Her tongue passes over her salty, stinging lips, lapping tiny bits of moisture. Sweat wicks from her arms, and she’d lick it up if she could before she loses it, those priceless pearls beading on her skin. But she can’t.

There’s still a rime of color on the furthest western peaks. She has to be still.

Rey begins to count. She’s good at counting; she can bear anything for ten seconds. Ten more. The next ten. And the next.

Then—

Darkness closes around her with the suddenness of desert nights. Perfect, pitchy darkness.

_Ten_.

She casts no shadow when she stands, hips protesting, ankles bursting into pain from their numbness. But pain is useless to her. She moves with assurance, making no sound as she flits over rocks and parched earth, boots never rustling through the sand, pale fabric fluttering from her twice-wrapped belt where she’s pushed back gauzy cloth from her head and shoulders, exposing a shabby gray vest and tunic-like shirt above loose trousers gathered and cut off below the knees. The colors she wears are light, reflective; such cloth wards off sunburn during the day’s hottest hours. She’s sure-footed, springing with a thrill at the power in her calves, her thighs, adrenaline lending her a heady speed after such painful stillness. Swift, graceful now. _Predatory_. After all, she’s had the whole day to plan her circuitous route. Stretching before her for balance against a hide-bound staff made of wood and capped with metal strapped to her back, her fingers taste the night, and she is running silently toward a distant spark of red, the eye of an ember or a demon god, almost calm. Idiots, lighting a fire at night.

Rey doesn’t think beyond her next stride, and the next.

Fear is as useless as pain.

—

Reinforced with leather stripped from his quad bike’s seat, his dark, quilted jacket holds his body’s warmth against the cold after nightfall. It suffocates him during the day—another test of his endurance, he knows—but he’s grateful for it now. He stands just beyond a circle of firelight that shimmers on a silty, half-sunken pond in the midst of the desert’s flat wasteland. A shadow. Always separate, apart from the others drinking distilled moonshine shit that passes for liquor these days. He despises them and their need for forgetting with alcohol. _Weakness_. He’s always despised them, even before the end, when they wore army fatigues together and had an uneasy camaraderie built on uniforms that the desert’s tearing apart to rags. But he needs them now—the blonde woman with an undercut, the greasy ginger with pale, calculating eyes, the man with hair like steel wool who never sunburns, the skinny kid barely out of his teens with a round face and horizontal ears. No one can survive alone. Not anymore. They’re the last, and much as he wishes he didn’t, he needs them.

The last.

No, not quite the last, he amends. _No_. One finger strokes a weight at his side, sensing a faint pulse of heat living within the metal. There have been...triggers...in the safeguards he’s set in place against intruders. Tripwires, makeshift explosives buried at the camp’s perimeter. Mostly jackals, he’d thought at first, though he’d never seen them. Night predators. But these disturbances aren’t caused by animals. He knows that, now. Animals leave prints, and trigger explosives. Animals steal food and water.

Not gasoline.

It was Phasma who first noticed a sloshing in the canisters after they’d filled their jugs from the last working pump in a hundred miles, taking their bikes on a grueling trip that burned fuel to collect more, to burn again on their next run into the shelled-out husk of a town, faces helmeted and masked to block radiation. A pointless cycle, and they all knew it.

“Fuck,” she’d muttered, hefting a can in one scarred hand when she’d gone to fill her quad’s tank in the morning, joggling it. “Listen.”

Half-empty.

“Did you fill it all the way?” Hux, the tactical ginger bastard, had asked.

“What do you think?” she’d snarled, her face barely an inch from his, towering over him. They fucked from time to time, these two, to their mutual dissatisfaction and Kylo’s disgust.

“Don’t you talk to me like—”

“Hey, I thought…” the weedy kid had started, then mumbled off, not wanting to get in the middle of their brewing fight. Phasma and Hux would end up rutting at the end of it, like they always did. Which was worse than their fighting. A waste of energy.

“ _What?_ ” They’d both rounded on him.

“It was the dreaming, again…” the kid, Mitaka, had said, reddening through his sunburn in humiliation. Still thinking about the past. Dreaming about the _then_. “I woke up, and I went to take a piss—”

“Wipe the snot and tears off your face,” Phasma had added while Hux shifted beside her, hand creeping over her ass.

“I thought I heard something. But it’s stupid. You probably just didn’t fill the can,” he’d snapped back, ears going crimson.

“What did you hear?” Kylo had asked Mitaka, voice even while Hux and Phasma started in with the next phase of their argument, rapidly minus their clothes. Turning his head away from the unsavory sight, Finn—the medic—had listened to Mitaka’s answer with a frown.

“Probably nothing, there’s nothing out there, it’s not like I’m scared of snakes or the dark—”

“What did you hear.”

The kid’s Adam’s apple had bobbed, a flicker in his skinny throat. _Fear_. More afraid of Kylo than the nightmare. Smart kid, sometimes. “Breathing. Someone breathing. A...a girl.”

Hux had scoffed. “Like anyone could tell that—” Phasma’d smacked him upside the head for diverting his mouth.

“What girl?” Kylo hadn’t questioned how Mitaka knew. Sometimes, there’s just knowing.

Like knowing that he’s never alone, no matter how far apart he keeps himself from the others, not even inside his own head. Not even out here.

The kid had flinched and shrugged, face angled away. “I...I don’t know.”

So he’d watched while the others drank their moonshine, a little pretense at camaraderie returning with the last of the shitty alcohol, Hux and Phasma on one side of the fire muttering together, Mitaka and Finn on the other, silent. He’d prowled along the perimeter of a tarp camp they’ve staked beside the only potable water in a range their bikes can speed before running dangerously low on fuel.

That water is life.

And...someone else is alive, too. Someone else out there.

He’s waiting tonight. In this darkness beside the fire, he can make himself disappear. Even watchful, frowning Finn has lost track of where he stands; the man’s eyes are glassy, reflecting the embers and staring off a good three yards from where Kylo waits. He has to be still. Whoever she is, she won’t come if he moves. The girl...  
His knees lock and he jerks himself upright again, thumbing the metal hanging at his hip. Cold. A shock of chill. He sharpens his gaze, wishing he could stub the fire out, let his eyes adjust to the dark...but he has to lure her with promises of stupidity.

Only idiots would light a fire at night.

—

She’s close enough now to pick out the humped shadows of bodies laid down for sleeping beneath a low-lying tarp staked into the ground. They’ve lit a fire that’s visible for miles around, and they’re sleeping. The nerve. The sheer _stupidity_. Grinning, Rey slows, feet coming softly against the baked earth, hopping a tripwire glinting in the firelight, skirting a disturbed patch of ground that probably conceals something explosive.

A grunting snore, thunder in the desert’s silence. The one with the open mouth, head thrown back and throat exposed, would be so easy to kill...but she doesn’t want to kill him.

She needs these fools to continue their runs to the southern town with its radiation and gasoline; she’s never known the town’s name, doesn’t know what state she’s in, doesn’t _want_ to know, to remember a time when things like that mattered. Rey has her yards of fabric to shelter her face—conserving moisture from breathing through her covered nose—and her double-stitched goggles, which protect her against dust devils when the winds pick up, but they’re no use with seeping, sickening radiation pouring down on her exposed skin, corrupting her lungs, making her vomit gray sludge. For protection against that, she’d need a helmet to survive.

Like these idiots.

Desert bikers, maybe, even if she can’t see the machines under another tarp. She’s heard the quads from a mile off; vibrating sounds like that carry long distances here. Or maybe military, from the logos on the gasoline canisters—a stylized sun or spoke inside a wheel—with text in sans-serif script reading _Property of the First Order_. Yes, more likely military; what biker gang would include _order_ in its name?

Whoever they are, she needs them to keep making their run to the town, so she can siphon off their gasoline—just enough to keep her rust bucket of a dirt bike running, building up her stolen cache on the side. So she can be ready. Always ready to run. The bike’s tank is small; she doesn’t take much. Nothing they’d miss, these idiots with their fire warm against the cold and their snores.

If she could just snatch a helmet…

She’s a scavenger, a parasite, but she’s not stupid. Take something like that, and they’d hunt her down. Kill her. Like she’d do to them if they’re taken such a priceless item from her. Yes—for that, she’d kill.

It’s not that she hasn’t killed before.

But that was self-defense. Almost. It’s a story she’s told herself for as long as the nightmares keep her awake. And it’s stupid, because everything is self-defense, now. Survival. But she has to draw the line somewhere, even if she despises herself for it.

Tonight is routine. It’s a run she’s made a handful of times before, though always along a different route. Well, it’s as routine as anything gets, these days. No need for killing. She’s been filching from these idiots for almost a month and they’re still alive, aren’t they?

No need to kill.

Flickering shadows from the fire’s edges lap a dozen yards in front of her. Adjusting her staff—the only weapon she trusts herself to carry—Rey drops to her belly. Crawling over the sand and chilly, blistered earth is uncomfortable, and sometimes there are scorpions. It’s a painful and risky way to move, but less so than walking up to the fire, making a pale shape against the dark. Besides, ground dwellers like snakes and tarantulas are slower to strike in the cold, and a scorpion sting’s painful but not usually deadly. Not yet, at least.

She’d swallowed down the last one that stung her, crunching its desiccated body between her teeth.

There’s no one to comment on her manners. She’s finally learned to chew with her mouth closed, but that’s only to keep as much moisture in her body as she can while she eats.

Nearly to the light, to where gasoline canisters are stacked just far enough from the fire that all the idiots’ hard work won’t go up in a mushroom cloud of foul, exploding smoke from a clumsy step if someone wakes to relieve himself—like two visits ago, when her heart had almost startled out of her chest at a sudden lurching movement toward her from under the tarp. Well, good. They’re not completely stupid. Just stupid enough.

_Quietly, quietly_.

But before she even knows what she’s done, she’s halted again, flattened against the burned ground, hands under her shoulders, muscles clenching along her spine. Instinct, shrill and piercing. More potent than her brain, than the rational thought she’s worked so hard to keep against the desert. She has to be smarter than the snakes, than the scorpions and the sun. But instinct has pushed her down like a boot on her tailbone.

_Be very still._

_Hold your breath._

_Disappear._

There’s nothing she can see that’s moved. But she doesn’t rise—because she already knows. She’s not the only predator near. With her clawing hands and the staff she’s worked her muscles to exhaustion to wield like an extension of her arm, her will, she’s not the most dangerous thing in the dark. How she knows this...but she listens to her body, to hairs rising on her clammy arms, the nape of her neck.

There’s too much silence. The silence of moving without noise. Something is hunting her.

Or someone.

And if she can’t disappear—

Her brain screams at her to move slowly, a thousand scenarios flitting through her mind. Quicksilver images. Useless. _Maybe if I—no, I won’t—I could—I can’t—_

Her body is louder, a force building in her abdomen, pressure growing, adrenaline spiking her blood, her pulse—if she can’t flee, she can always, always fight—

She’s up faster even than she dropped, shoulders moving to sling her quarterstaff around and into her hands, and she can see everything, each pinprick of a star in some distant, peaceful galaxy, and then the darkness is unfolding, rushing toward her in supreme silence, becoming massive arms, hands large enough to crush her skull, height scaling higher and higher until the stars are gone and there’s only a black wind.

The man—she knows it’s a man by his breathing—catches her from behind before she can swing her staff to face him. He’s surrounding her and Rey’s no weakling, not easily scared, but now she’s afraid, because he’s not an idiot, he’s grabbed the ends of her staff so that she’s pinned between him and her own weapon, trapped, and she’s struggling forward, choking against the rod she’s made herself, to protect herself—no, this is _not_ how she dies—

“The girl I’ve heard so much about…” he mutters, tightening his grip, almost like they’re having a casual conversation—

_Think_ , Rey. _Use your goddamn_ head.

She breathes once, deeply, ignoring the ache in her half-crushed windpipe. An influx of air and sharp pain clears her mind fractionally.

Just enough.

There’s one advantage to him being so damn tall, and it’s that the crown of her head fits beneath his chin. It’s going to hurt like hell, and she hopes he breaks all his teeth—Rey _jumps_. It’s such a stupid move that he doesn’t seem to expect it, because she’s not trying to twist away, she’s leaping up into him—her head drives against his chin, and she thinks she’s split her skull, but suddenly he’s gagging, in surprise and pain—she’s freed her elbows, and they find his ribs. When he lurches back, she goes with him, yanking on her staff, hurling up her legs, using his falling momentum to propel herself into the air, kicking backwards over him in an awkward somersault, landing on her feet.

Then she’s running as his companions wake to the ground shaking beneath the fall of his body, the impact of her landing. She’s staggering but she’s fast, she has to be, she’s the fastest goddamn runner the world has ever seen, and if she’s gasping at the pain in her neck—well, she’ll breathe again later. Adrenaline’s the best opioid, and she’s got it in _spades_.

She didn’t get the gasoline, but she’s alive. And she runs.

Running, running, running. It seems like hours.

Only a little dizzy, which isn’t surprising, since she’s breathing so hard that a flood of oxygen is swamping her brain, and she’s overflowing...and alive. Just a little...dizzy...too much adrenaline, and she’s bleeding, the nape of her neck and her ears heating...

_Alive_ , she repeats like a mantra, careening along on ankles that can’t seem to take her weight, jarring impacts from sun-broiled soil aching in her knees, her hips, her head. _Alive_.

Alive, and she wishes she had her staff...but it’s gone, still in his hands, and she couldn’t wrench it free...it would prop her up...only half-conscious now, her head splitting, a hatchet in her skull...damn his chin...no, she has to keep running...they have the gasoline and the bikes...she has to hide, but there’s nowhere to hide…

_Use your_ head _, Rey._

_I did...and I’m not...I’m...I…_

_Disappear._

She drops where she stands, because it’s the only sensible option and her legs have collapsed. She’s not even sure which direction she’s been running. Her own bike...she has a canister half-full of emergency fuel that she’d meant to top off at the pond...but the bike’s back in her dugout...she could be safe there, but she’s in the open...and she’s fallen...

_Be still. Be stone. Be nothing_.

Rey stares up at the stars. They wink at her, at some cosmic joke that she’s pretty sure is at her expense. Everything beautiful mocks her in the end...the sun, the stars...the dark is coming…

_You’re no one!_ That horrible nightmare voice, shouting. _No one cares what happens to you, you little bitch. You’re nothing!_

With a great effort, she wills herself to dissolve, water on baked earth, a little thing of clay.

_Yes. I am...nothing._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're enjoying Sun, Sand, and Stone, tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Posting schedule: Mondays and Thursdays?)
> 
> Our boy tries to talk to a girl.

Whatever he’d been expecting tonight, it wasn’t _this_.

A girl, like Mitaka had said, coming for their gasoline with sticky fingers. How’s she even surviving on her own? For a day, maybe it’s possible. But for the full two weeks she’s been filching from the canisters? And those are just the weeks they know about.

No, he isn’t curious about that. Pissed, sure. She’d knocked out a molar with that stunt using her head, but it’d probably hurt her worse than him. She’d been stronger than he’d anticipated, but if she’d split his chin, she would’ve injured herself, too. He believes that. No one comes off well from a fight with Kylo Ren.

But then she’d run. Fast.

Well, she hadn’t gotten the gasoline. He smirks at that, and his aching jaw creaks. _Fuck_ , she’s hard-headed.

“So a little girl beat you on your ass, sir?” Hux sneers, having counted the gasoline canisters with infuriating thoroughness while Kylo’s flat on the ground, trying to breathe around his broken teeth.

“She was strong. Knew how to use her body weight.” He sits up gingerly, touching his jaw. Tacky moisture comes away on his fingers. “But she’s injured. She has to be. She won’t have gotten far.”

“You want to follow her?” Finn looks up from where he’s rummaging through the camp’s medkit.

Kylo shakes his head at the sticking plaster. He’ll just sweat it off when the sun comes up, and the burning, scorching light’s as good a disinfectant as anything in the kit’s vacuum-sealed plastic packs. _Save it_. They’d only meant to be in the desert for a couple months. A training exercise. All their supplies are running past the half-empty point.

It’s actually a fucking miracle that they’ve survived this long without contact from the compound. Even after the end of everything, someone has to be tracking them, observing how they’re coping with the conditions—treating the apocalypse like another simulation. He _feels_ it, a broken window pane in the back of his head, a prickle on his nape. But there’s been no communication, and the weeks drag on.

“I want to find her,” he says now. “She’s on her own. How’s she still alive? She must know something we don’t, or she’d be dead already.”

Hux gives a long-suffering sigh. “You just don’t like that she knocked the shit out of you.”

That’s true, but he’ll never admit it to the weaselly bastard. No one’s made him bleed since... _before_. He hates the feeling.

But he’s...well, he _is_ intrigued. He’s never felt anyone use their body like that, as if muscle and bone are coiled springs that only need a release trigger to explode. An avalanche. She’d fought him like pain was no burden to her, like she didn’t care how much she hurt herself as long as she took him down, too. He’d been stronger than her, of course. He’s well over six feet, with a build to match. He’s honed his body to fight, and he’s good at it. He has to be. But he hadn’t been able to hold her. It’d been like trying to grasp live lightning in his bare hands, and she’s marked him. Groaning, he spits out his broken tooth, spraying blood over his lips.

He should’ve used the butt of his pistol on her temple, or stuck the barrel into her ear, but he hadn’t been able to reach it with her twisting against him, giving no quarter even when he’d pinned her to his chest. She’s got elbows like spars. Wincing, he massages his ribs where she’d struck him. He’s used to a steady diet of pain. But not like this, so sharp and unexpected.

He wants nothing more than to collapse back onto the ground, but he can’t stay down. Not with the others watching him. There’s no place for weakness here, in the order that’s barely braced against anarchy. They have their roles. He wouldn’t hesitate to cast off anyone who’d outlived their usefulness, and he knows they feel the same. Hux, Phasma, and Mitaka, at least. Finn’s harder to read, even away from their classified, clandestine military base where they’d all schooled every word, every expression. _First Order_. Not that the name has ever appeared on any official documentation. Yes, Finn’s hard to read, and more janitorial than surgical with his medkit—but it takes him longer to sunburn than the others, so he’s useful.

For now.

Motivating himself with his pain, Kylo stands. Finn’s quick to retreat from his shadow against the fire. At least the lure worked with the girl. But she won’t be so stupid next time, he reasons. He has to find her tonight. _Now_ , before the desert makes her vanish with its own brand of justice against intruders.

His bike roars to life when he mangles the throttle. A rumbling cacophony surges up behind him as the others kick open their own gauges; they don’t question him on this. Not yet. Spewing sand from their wheels douses the fire and Finn in flying grit. Someone has to keep guard at the life-giving pond, and Kylo has no patience for misdirected principles about doing no harm during a hunt. A chase. His blood hums along with the gasoline flowing beneath him as he speeds into the first threads of daylight. It doesn’t matter how much noise he’s making, gunning the ignition; there’s no way to be stealthy in the desert. There’s no one but her to hear the noise. He wants her to know he’s coming. And he’ll find her. He will.

There’s nowhere for the girl to go.

—

She’s...not dead. But Rey’s not certain she’s really alive, either. She’d disappeared like she’d needed to, she’s pretty sure. Becoming nothing...it’s worked out here on the ground under the sky, like it’s worked before beneath a swath of peeling green wallpaper, on a rotten mattress, staring up at a nicotine-stained ceiling. But now she’s having trouble making herself come back. It hurts too much to be in her body. Better to...not be.

But dawn’s on the horizon and she’s exposed, her limbs splayed out on the seared earth and intensely vulnerable to tides of sunlight and heat. A seastar, her hazy brain thinks, supplying an image that’s so radically inappropriate that she snorts. And groans, pale tongue tracing her cracked lips. Oceans...so much water, but she can’t drink it, she’s too far away, hasn’t ever seen the sea, even _before_. Only in her better dreams...Besides, saltwater would kill her.

She’ll die anyway if she stays where she is.

Cradling her head, Rey makes it onto her knees. She’s barely a foot from the ground, but the cracked soil is swaying beneath her, vertigo threatening to split her apart. She closes her eyes, focusing on the feel of her palms pressing to the earth, the hard ache of her knees. Better. A little better. She steadies, and her unruly mind thinks how unfair it is that she has to walk on two feet when other animals get four. A stupid way to travel, so easy to fall. But this body isn’t made for crawling, for running on hands and knees. She has to stand.

Whoever designed the human spine listened to a terrible focus group. It’s no use at holding her upright.

But then there’s thunder in the distance, and the sky is clear, a hard, steely blue even at daybreak, and suddenly her legs get some goddamn motivation. The sounds are coming from the west, so she heads east; she’d gone west to find the encampment, and all she needs to do is retrace her route. Theoretically. She’ll grab her dirt bike and everything else she can carry from her hideout, and she’ll go. She doesn’t really stand a chance of outrunning them on two patched, bald tires, but it’ll be better than having only her legs.

She runs. Aching. Dizzy. The thunder’s louder, now. Four bikes, she thinks, because her mind is focusing on stupid stuff like that. Not that it matters. They’re coming for her, and she’s burning with lactic acid, halfway to heat exhaustion already, running under the rising sun.

When she can feel the quad bikes’ vibrations under her feet, when she knows they’ve seen her—of course they have; there’s nowhere to hide—she whirls. She’s not going to die running. She’s _not_. Her scabbed hands fist as the four riders approach, heads helmeted. Faceless monsters.

 _Face me like a man!_ she’d shout in terrified bravado, if she could breathe. If sheer bombast could make any difference. But she can’t, and it doesn’t, and she’s doubling over, vomiting from the sudden cease in motion. Precious moisture from her stomach seeps into the ground. The thunder’s all around her, surrounding her as the giant of a man had done in the night, black and terrible. There’s nowhere for her to go. She tries to lift her head from between her knees, to glare at the tinted helmet approaching her above colossal boots with rusted buckles, but she can’t—she can’t…

“It’s you,” the featureless helmet says, inflectionless, emotionless through the visor.

No, not the helmet...there’s a man inside it, isn’t there?...but Rey’s not sure of much anymore…

Somehow, instead of smacking the ground with her falling body, her eyes blackening with sunspots, with lapsing consciousness, she is rising.

—

She’s surprisingly heavy for such a skinny thing. Kylo heaves her over his bike’s seat, holding her in place with arms around her shoulders. Not her waist. That would leave her elbows free if she wakes up during the ride. Her head lolls back, thudding against his helmet where his chin would be if he’d left his head uncovered. Even unconscious with dried blood straggling through hair done up in three weird buns to circumvent the doubled straps from her goggles—like she’s going to the damn opera—she’s fighting back.

He doesn’t know why that makes him grin. Sourly, but it’s an expression his mouth hasn’t made in a long time. It feels...odd.

He doesn’t look to see whether Phasma, Hux, and Mitaka are following him, just opens his throttle and rockets off. The force of his speed presses the girl back against him, and he learns the reason for her weight: her shoulders and arms are thick with muscle. They’re stringy from lack of food, but the muscles curl around her bones with promises of a stark power.

He’s glad she’s unconscious.

The sun’s breaking toward midday when he cuts his ignition near the pond, swinging off his bike’s seat. He hauls the slumped girl with him and onto the ground. He ignores Finn’s widening eyes, ignores the disbelief flickering off the medic as he stares at the girl, small and slight-looking until you notice the muscled lines in her arms, her calves.

 _This girl kicked_ your _ass?_

“Zip-ties,” he says. Finn hands over the plastic bindings from his kit as the others dismount and remove their helmets. Kylo keeps his on, though he’s sweating inside it. He tightens the white ties around the girl’s wrists in front of her, glad he’s still wearing the headpiece when Hux makes a dissenting noise at the placement.

He’s not looking to hurt her. Not yet. There’s time for that later, if she won’t cooperate. He tugs off her shabby boots and tosses them to Finn, which the other man drops them beside her confiscated quarterstaff—not a lethal instrument, but bizarrely effective. No need to bind her ankles; she can’t run off with bare feet. For all that he’s managed to catch her, Kylo doesn’t think she’s that stupid.

“Looks like she’s got a concussion,” Finn says, watching him watching the girl, his voice a reminder not to linger. “That from where she hit you?”

Kylo nods, stepping back while Finn squats down beside the unconscious girl, fingers extended to probe the sticky patch on her head, leaking again from vibrations in Kylo’s bike over the rough terrain.

“Well, she took the brunt of it. Head wounds always bleed a lot, but…” He hooks a foot around the straps on his medkit and hauls it over, rummaging through the bag’s pouches with an eye fixed on the girl’s still face.

She’s _very_ still, and Kylo frowns within his helmet.

“You’re not using anything from the kit on her,” Hux says in disgust, and kicks the bag away from Finn. “You stupid?”

“She can’t talk if she’s dead,” Kylo interjects before Finn can retort. He kicks the medkit back to him. “Do what you need to do to wake her up.”

Finn hesitates, eyes swiveling between Kylo and Hux. Then, he shrugs. Fingers moving with strange subtlety, he removes the girl’s goggles, parts her hair, and cleans a jagged cut stretching along the crown of her scalp with a cotton ball soaked in antiseptic. It needs stitches. She’s strong, yes, but brittle, Kylo thinks, watching Finn tend to his captured scavenger.

She’s unconscious through the better part of the day, but Finn manages to stem her bleeding. Phasma ignores the girl in favor of polishing her bike’s handlebars with her sleeve until the sun drives her under the tarp’s shade. Hux’s lips are folded so thinly that his mouth has disappeared while he watches Mitaka heft the gasoline canisters, making sure nothing’s been stolen on Finn’s watch; it’s an expression Kylo knows bodes no good. But the bastard won’t try anything on the girl with him looking on. Finn just sits beside her limp body, frowning.

Kylo removes his helmet when the heat becomes too intense, crowding in with the others beneath their low tarp, the only shelter for miles of scalding dirt and scrub. He can barely sit upright, let alone move without knocking elbows against one of the others, and since he has to school his expression better, he doesn’t look at the girl again. His jaw throbs.

It’s hard to tell time with the air quality so fucked up and the sun’s shadows falling wrongly, but he thinks it’s close to mid-afternoon when the girl stirs. Finn’s drooping head snaps up at the change in her breathing’s tenor, but Kylo’s already watching her. The medic frowns at Kylo’s attention, then scoots around Mitaka to check her pulse. His patient, for what it’s worth. He gives way when Kylo edges closer, though.

“Just...don’t hit her too hard. Her head’s gonna be a little fragile.”

Kylo’s chin disagrees, but he gives a single sharp nod, and the others shift back from his space beside her.

He gives himself the luxury of studying her, this girl, this stranger. It’s an invasion of her privacy, his looking while she’s half-conscious—but for all his zip-ties, he doubts whether he’ll have this chance again. And he’s curious. How has she survived, all on her own?

She’s tanned with weather, her throat is mottled purple from her stunt with the staff, and the beginnings of wrinkles have started to dig between her eyebrows with squinting against the desert’s glare. With frowning. Even mostly unconscious, she seems annoyed. But freckles dusting the bridge of her nose and across her cheekbones are delicate, somehow. A description comes to him without rational thought, a description from _before_ , when beauty standards had meant something: _sun-kisses_. A stupid detail. The sun doesn’t kiss, here. It burns and it bakes and it hates. But it doesn’t seem to hate her. It’s browned her, but without malice. The truth is uncomfortable to him, but with her pale, bitten lips and her eyelashes stuck together with sweat over tip-tilted eyes, she’s beautiful.

Angry with himself, Kylo raises a hand to slap her back into consciousness. Finn clears his throat, reminding him of...something. Yes, that her skull’s fragile. Instead of a slap, his fingertips brush her temple. Damp, slightly curling hair beside her ear clings to his fingers when he withdraws at the first sign of fluttering from her eyelids.

But she doesn’t open her eyes. Instead, her chest stills. A tiny tremor tucks the corners of her lips. Beneath its sheen of sweat, he can see the pulse in her throat accelerate. There’s the barest hint of a shiver in her hands, finding the zip-ties over her wrists. And he can _feel_ her thinking, stalling for time while the others still think she’s dead to the world. Clever girl.

Not clever enough.

“I know you’re awake,” he murmurs, as though this is a secret they share.

“Then why are you whispering?” she demands, clear and loud. Her voice rasps in her bruised throat, but if it hurts her, she makes no sign. Her eyes snap open, boring into his. Hazel, flecked with sunlight off the pond.

Fuck, why’d he take his helmet off?

“Who are you?” he says, sharper than he’d intended, to catch her off-guard, to break the gaze she’s fastened upon him like a steel cable.

Her mouth twists. “I’m no one. I’m nothing.”

“What’s your name?” he fires back.

“Is this an interrogation?” She doesn’t sound afraid, and her eyes return to his. A challenge.

“Yes.”

“Are you going to kill me?” There’s no fear in her voice. Just mild interest.

“That depends.” He doesn’t know if he’s bluffing. He’s killed before. She probably has, too. And it’s a fair question. He just doesn’t have the answer.

Wait, _fuck_ , what is he doing? How has she turned the tables on him in thirty seconds flat, making him question, making him wonder about the end? Him, Kylo Ren, master of interrogation techniques that have made hardened military troops quail? True, he hasn’t used them yet, but—

“On what?”

It takes him another second to remember what she’s asking. And then he claws back to himself—he doesn’t have to answer her questions. “Tell me your name.”

Her deliberation is infuriating, determining whether to answer him. Then, she shrugs her shoulders, visibly deciding that it doesn’t matter. “Rey.”

“Yeah, Rey what?”

“Just Rey.” And it happens so fast that he could’ve imagined it, but there’s a flicker at the corners of her eyes. A shadow, like a rumor of tears. Then it’s gone, wicked away in the heat if it ever existed, and she’s scowling up at him like she wants to tear half his face off. “What’s yours?” she bites out.

For yet another whole damn second, he can’t remember what the question was. “My what?”

“Your name.”

“Does it matter?” He hardens his expression, knowing that the others are watching him closer than a pack of feral dogs.

“If you were just going to kill me, I’d say no. But since it _depends_ , I’d like to know who I’m talking to. No harm done if you end up offing me, right?” And she grins until her gums are shrunken and bloody with exposure to the heat, while he tries to come up with a response to that question, to that damn smile.

Finally, he says, “Kylo. Kylo Ren. Officer of the First Order _—_ ”

“Your parents must’ve really hated you.”

He’s not even aware of moving until he’s already brought his hand down on her cheek so hard that her head snaps back. Her eyes roll white, the hazel irises disappearing into her skull.

“Smooth, sir,” Phasma drawls.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're enjoying Sun, Sand, and Stone, tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Our boy tries again...and our girl is not a fan.

Rey wakes for the second time with her hands zip-tied—but now her arms are twisted behind her back, and she’s lying face-down in the dirt, dust coating the inside of her mouth. Her feet are still bare, and the soles feel tender with their nakedness in the air, so dry it wrinkles uncovered skin. Not really an improvement, but not all that bad, either. Of course, she still aches...everywhere. It seems best to remain quiet for a while, cracking her salt-crusted eyelids just a hair, exploring her surroundings with touch and a sliver of sight. She’s in too much pain to do more.

She’s still under the tarp, and there are people breathing behind her where she’s slumped on the ground. A coppery stench threads through the odors of heat and sweat. _Fear_. Not her fear. Someone else is afraid.

And then there’s Kylo Ren. She feels the prickle of his attention on her exposed shoulders, worming its way between the stitches someone has made in her splitting scalp, a fierce and insistent pressure. Angry. He has a temper like a child, all volatile lashing out, annoyance escalating to fury in a heartbeat. Goading him hadn’t been her smartest move, but his response lets her know where she stands. She can provoke him into doing something rash. She just has to be patient...but her mouth is full of grit and she’s suddenly aware that she’s very, very thirsty. How many hours since she’s had a drink?

Behind her, something tinkles—water against a metal bottle. A moan escapes her before she can swallow it down.

A silent argument at her back, and then—

“She’s dehydrated! She’s going to die if she doesn’t drink something—”

“You keep threatening that she’s going to die like it matters. Like we should care.” A cold, sneering voice.

“Get her some water.” Command. _His_ voice.

She recognizes it as a threat. If she refuses to drink, he’ll make her. But she won’t refuse. A hand cradles the back of her head, turning her until she can see the tent’s low, peaked roofline. A face made of hazy shadows appears above her. Not _his_ face.

“Are you thirsty?” this other man asks her, offering a metal canteen. There’s a smell of steel from the bottle and again...copper on his skin.

She nods. He holds the nozzle to her lips, tilting the canteen up, helping her pull down the water. She drinks until her lips make a dry squelching against the rubber nipple.

“Better?”

She manages another nod, and turns her face away. Kindness from strangers never bodes well. Not _before_ , and not now. Certainly not from strangers in shabby military gear, their presence a dark scar against the tawny desert.

“You can have more later, but you shouldn’t drink too much at first—” A quick glance over his shoulder at something Rey can’t see, and he scrambles aside. Yes, he’s afraid.

And then _he_ ’s back. Like he ever really left.

“Comfortable?” Kylo Ren asks her.

 _Sick bastard_. “Not really.”

He doesn’t respond to that. “You were stealing the gasoline.”

Rey snorts, clearing her sinuses, sucking back her own fear. “We’re going to pick up where you left off? You backhanded me when you didn’t like my answers, and you think I’m just going to keep answering whatever you ask me? If I get hit whether I talk or not, why should I—”

“How are you still alive?” he cuts across her.

“Well, you’re not helping—”

He grabs her shoulder, rolling her onto her back. Her knuckles crackle when her full weight comes to rest on her zip-tied wrists. “You’re alone. You have nothing. How are you alive?”

Rey shrugs. Stupid question.

“ _What do you know?_ ” His fingers pinch down on either side of her mouth, holding her jaw in place, gripping her with hands and gaze. Her head hurts too much to try wrenching away, though every nerve in her body is firing, screaming at her.

What does she know?

She knows that looking at Kylo Ren is dizzying. Face so pale, it’s like he’s never seen the sun, with blunt, dark dots of moles on his cheeks and forehead. He must keep his helmet on almost constantly; there’s no trace of sun-burning or tanning. Black hair to his shoulders, curling with sweat over a quilted jacket collar that’s soaked in perspiration from the heat, but which he hasn’t removed. Features too large for his face, oddly proportioned, asymmetrical. Each component part is perfect. Together, the ugliness of the whole struggles against its particular beauty. No...not ugly. Unhandsome? Yes, and it’s appalling, staring up into those eyes, all blown black pupils in the tarp’s shadow.

What does she know?

She knows that she’s the only one who’s ever stolen from this man, and that no one ever will again. His violence vacillates on a knife’s edge. Looming over her, blocking out the tent and the darkening sky beyond it, he conquers the desert itself.

“I can make you talk,” he says, bending near, fingers tightening on her jaw, unaware of what she’s seen.

Like she’s even capable of escaping him, addled as she is. “You can try.” Her voice is flat, and she’s proud of how little it shakes.

“Tell me how you’ve survived on your own. You, a _scavenger_. Tell me what you know,” he repeats himself, and Rey has the impression that this is something he never has to do. He doesn’t seem to have any other words to ask her for what he wants. Someone clears their throat from outside her line of sight. Kylo Ren’s flexible lips tighten, and his fingers clench harder around her mouth.

But this particular brand of interrogation doesn’t work on her. She’s used to people hurting her to get what they want. Pain, she can endure. It’s familiar. It doesn’t scare her.

“I’m not telling you anything.” She’s defying him on instinct, really. What does he expect her to say? Does he think it’s easy for her, surviving in the desert alone? He wants a secret that she doesn’t have. There’s a rage and wanting and hunger in the man staring down at her with fathomless onyx eyes that makes her shiver despite the heat.

 _Not fear_ , she reminds herself.

“You know I can take whatever I want from you.” The threat in his voice deepens, a reaction to the skepticism, the distaste from his comrades.

“I’m not giving you anything, either.” That’s why it’s better to be alone. Rey never has to think about anyone else while she does what she has to do to survive, while she fights herself and the desert. There’ve been things she’s not proud of, sometimes, but there’s been no one to witness her shame. She’s not lonely. She’s alive.

And she never, _ever_ has to share.

“We’ll see.” His head tilts fractionally, appraising.

“Look,” she snaps between the lips he’s pushed together with the force of his grip, suddenly pissed at the direction this conversation is taking, because he should either deal with her with whatever contingency plan he’s got, or just let her get on with her life—which is hard enough without him fucking up her routine, her _plan_ , thanks very much—“I’ve always been on my own out here. I don’t know what you think I’m going to tell you, or give you. I don’t have any damn pockets, and I’m sure you’ve checked me and my satchel over for knives and compasses and maps”—she doesn’t know what to do with the flush spreading over his cheekbones, so she ignores it—“and I’m stuck here, now, same as you.”

“ _Now?_ ” he seizes on the word.

Rey rolls her eyes, which at least doesn’t hurt. “Did _you_ live here, _before_?”

A sharp shake of his head, seemingly before he realizes he’s answered her question. His mouth folds. Angry with himself.

“You’re not military. So where did you come from? You should be dead out here.”

“Nowhere.”

“No one’s from nowhere.”

Rey snorts again. “I am.”

“Where’s nowhere?” a different voice asks. The dark man who gave her the water?

And just as abruptly as she was furious a minute ago, she’s...tired. Her wrists hurt from the zip-ties, and she can deal with that later, but not until the interrogation’s over. Maybe weakness isn’t such a bad ploy, seeming to give into the intimidation. It’ll certainly seem realistic. “A group home in Nevada,” Rey says to that other voice. “Takodana. Nowhere.”

“Takodana.” It’s Kylo Ren who repeats the word.

“Yeah. Shit place,” she adds, because his attention has sharpened until it’s a laser drilling between her eyes, like he’ll peel back flesh and bone to probe the channels of memory in her brain. She hates it, that something about that shithole has caught his interest.

“ _Tako-dana._ ”

“That’s what I said.”

He just stares, making no response to her rude tone. Stares _through_ her, which is both better and worse than when he’s boring into her with those black eyes. His face is so mobile, so expressive, and she’s afraid of what she’s going to see. Nothing good. Then, “ _Green place_. It means _green place_ , in the Native American Kanata dialect.”

“Well, it’s not. You ever been to Nevada?”

He ignores this. “And you know where it is.”

“I’m good at forgetting.” Not true, but she’s never going back to that place. She knows what he’s going to ask, and she can’t, not even if he threatens to blow her head off with that ugly pistol on his belt, she _can’t_ —

“ _Tako-dana_ ,” he repeats. “You’re going to take me there.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No—look, there’s no green place. Takodana’s not better than here. It’s just...somewhere else.”

He releases her so suddenly that she gasps, her jaw gone numb from his grip. “We’ll fuel up the bikes tomorrow from the Mesa Tempe pumps. Replenish whatever gasoline she’s taken. Tomorrow night, we head west.”

“If she’s lying—” the pasty man with the dead-fish eyes starts.

“She doesn’t know what she has in her head: the way there. Why would she lie, if she doesn’t know its value?”

“She’s a map,” a woman’s voice says. “You know what we do with useless maps.”

And that seems to settle the question.

Kylo Ren tightens her zip-ties for the night while the others share around ration portions, then roll into their sleeping bags—military-issue, made to keep a body warm down to minus twenty degrees. She flexes her wrists, a tactic she’s learned to keep restraints looser; he knows the trick, and gives the ties a vicious twist so that she chokes in pain, erasing the gap she’s managed to hold between the bones of her hands. He doesn’t offer her any rations, but the other man—the kinder man—slips her more water when Kylo Ren’s off to check his quad bike’s gas tank or pressure gauge.

Rey swallows down the filtered pond water. It still tastes scummy after the purification system and iodine tablets, but it’s so much better than anything she’s had in months. There’s algae in mud and vitamins in silt, she’s told herself, to make herself stomach the sludge she’s dredged up from a dry riverbed where she’s made her own camp. She’s strained water from the mud through the wraps she wears, drop by prized drop.

Enough to survive. Just enough.

“I’m sorry,” the man with the water bottle mutters, so low she’s not sure he’s actually spoken.

“What?”

His eyes flicker sideways. He makes a quick motion to check her zip-ties, ducking his face into deeper shadows sweeping over the desert floor as the last threads of light fade into darkness. She can feel his fingers wince at the tight plastic digging into her wrists. He shakes his head, just a fraction.

“Can you loosen these?” Rey barely shapes the words with her lips, imitating his silence, his warning.

“No,” he breathes back.

“Finn—what are you doing? You talking to her?” a woman’s voice cracks over them.

The man, Finn, gives a sudden jerk to Rey’s ties, and she whimpers at the cut of plastic into her flesh. _Never trust kindness from a stranger._ He doesn’t look at her, doesn’t react. “Just tightening her restraints. Wouldn’t want the scavenger scum to get loose.”

He’s a survivor, too. She recognizes this in the man crouched over her. Maybe he’d help her if he could, if helping her wouldn’t hurt him. But he won’t, because it would. He’s scared, a halfway scared between too scared and not scared enough. Well, she’s never counted on having help tonight. But the blood on her tongue from where she’s bitten into her cheek at a sudden dig of the plastic ties tastes like disappointment.

Kylo Ren returns from his quad bike, and the others fall quiet. Rey watches him through slitted eyes. Standing outside the tarp while she’s on the ground under it, he’s as tall as the sky. His gaze finds her once, evaluating the restraints. Then, he shakes out a sleeping bag from a dirty backpack, checks it for scorpions and snakes—Rey hopes a tarantula bites him in the night—stoops under the tarp, and zips himself into the thermal-reflective sleeve. Even lying down, the breadth of his chest and shoulders is gigantic.

Just like no one offered her any rations, she’s not given a sleeping bag or blanket, either. Without thermal insulation, it’s going to be a very cold night. The First Order troops haven’t lit a fire with the synthetic charcoal they’d used last time—there’s little wood in the desert, and it’s too precious to burn. She was an idiot for thinking they’d really be that stupid, keeping a fire going at night just to stay warm. The universe is too big of a bitch to every give anything easily to her.

There’s no fire tonight, because there’s no one else to lure. No one stands guard with the likely explosives and definite tripwires. She’s the only other living person for miles, and with zip-ties bruising her wrists, she’s not a threat anymore. Especially not barefooted and freezing.

But the cold’s not really a problem. In fact, what she’s going to have to do later will probably hurt less if her hands are numb. She’ll just have to be careful not to let her teeth chatter. Rey forces herself to be still.

It’s something she knows.

She begins to count.

An hour passes.

Another.

She tracks the seconds, the minutes, patient on the ground. The breathing around her evens out. First the boy that the others call Mitaka, then the blonde woman. The red-haired man takes a while longer, but by the time Rey’s counted one hundred and eighty seven minutes, he’s gone, too. Finn follows soon after, snoring. Of course, he’d be the one to snore. And Kylo Ren...she’s beginning to doubt that he actually sleeps— _one hundred and ninety three_ , _one hundred and ninety eight_ —when a shadow of movement crosses his face in the dark, and his mouth softens.

Rey forces herself to wait another cycle of counting to ten, waiting for him to betray himself, waiting for a sign that she won’t have to do the next part. This part _hurts_. He only sighs and turns half onto his stomach, and her patience waiting for the pain is worn through.

She’d learned how to slip her restraints when she’d been a scrawny teenager on the run with a string of shameful, petty thefts in her file. In the back of a squad car or at the station, she didn’t look dangerous. Small, ratty, underfed. Back then, her wrists had been halfway loose in the cuffs on even their tightest settings. It’d been easier to get free. Sometimes, she hadn’t even had to dislocate her thumbs.

But these zip-ties are really damn tight.

Angling her neck, Rey catches her sleeve in her teeth. She needs to bite down on something, or she’ll make a noise. Then she breathes, once, steeling herself. She hasn’t had to do this in a while, but the pain’s always as bad as she remembers.

She rubs her wrists together, chafing her flesh against the plastic ties until a thin smear of blood slicks her skin. _Okay, okay_. When she’s gotten herself as slippery as she can stand before the pain short-circuits her brain, she twists an agonizing rotation so that instead of the heels of her hands knocking together, she’s lined up her thumbs side by side. She’s groaning silently into her shirt, teeth clenched, and _goddamn_ it hurts, but she’s almost there.

Her body wants to resist her, but Rey bears down, ignoring the neurons firing, shrieking for her to stop. She curls the fingers of each hand over the columns of her thumbs, and she _pulls_. The right one pops free first, and she’s bitten through her shirt so she has to sink her teeth into her tongue instead. Her mouth is full of blood; it’s dripping down her chin. She gives another jerk with her left hand, and her left thumb comes loose from its socket.

The pain makes her dizzy, so she stays down for a few seconds, letting her body adjust. Pain hurts less when she’s still. Then, _ten_. Without the bulge from her thumbs adding a half-inch to the width of each hand, she can slip the zip-ties off with only a little effort.

She doesn’t give herself even her normal ten seconds to rest after that, just slams her thumbs back into their sockets—they’ll be sore for a few days, and she’ll wrap them up when she has time, but they’re functional enough right now, if aching—and then she drags herself onto her knees. Her head reels from the sudden change in position, but she steadies quickly enough. Lying down for the hours of her interrogation wasn’t actually the worst way she could’ve come through her concussion’s first period. She’s tender all over from the restraints and the tension, and someone’s beating a drum between her temples. But like her thumbs, she’s functional. She doesn’t keel over when she begins to crawl from the tent, her movements silent beneath Finn’s snoring.

Finn, whose body is next to her staff, boots, and satchel.

Holding her roaring head, Rey kneels beside him and snakes out her other hand, looping the satchel over her forearm and grabbing her boots between her middle and index fingers to spare her thumbs. A quick up-ending to make sure nothing’s lurking inside them, and she shoves her abused feet into the cold leather. Reaching for her staff is harder without her thumbs’ usual grip, and her hand makes an awkward cradle around it when she draws its length from under the tarp.

A hook on the staff’s shoulder strap catches against Finn’s sleeping bag.

_Shit!_

An aborted cough startles from the peaceful rhythm of his snoring. His eyes flick open, their whites shining in the dark. Rey’s clothes are made with light colors, for daylight, for hiding against the sand. She’s too pale for the night, crouching close beside him. His gaze finds the patch of darkness where she’s struggling not to breathe, to blend into the shadows when she knows it’s impossible.

Impossible, but he blinks at her, and then his lips move silently. Something, she can’t catch the word. A pause. His forehead furrows into gaping black lines at her stupidity. He repeats the word with an exaggerated mouth in exaggerated silence, and then she understands.

It’s a word she knows.

 _Run_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're enjoying Sun, Sand, and Stone, tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things take a slithery turn...

It’s dark, and she’s gone.

There’s a stain on the ground where she’d been tied, fading already. He can see it even in the darkness, a stark splotch against the sandy earth. Blood.

His shout isn’t a word, or even an expletive. Just anger bursting over his tongue. “Where is she?” he mangles out around clenched teeth. A single glance shows that her boots, satchel, and staff are gone. “ _Fuck!_ ”

The others are quick to wake, but he’s already yanking down the tarp on top of them and stuffing it into his military-issue backpack before they’ve unzipped their bags.

“Sir—”

“Get on your damn quad, Finn.”

“But—”

“Did you help her? Where’re the zip-ties? I saw you giving her water again. Saw you talking to her. I swear to Christ, I’ll haul you upside down and shake you until your teeth and eyeballs fall out if you—”

“I don’t have the zip-ties. I didn’t loosen them.” For some reason, the idiot’s _calm_ , staring out at the desert. Pitch-black. Nothing. No sign of her.

“Then how’d she get out? She made a blood-sleeve to get loose, and she couldn’t have done that with the ties as tight as I cinched them.”

“I don’t know,” Finn’s retort is a grunt now, his face shining with sweat. “Do you want me to get on the quad, or not? ’Cause I can’t when you’ve got me in a headlock. _Sir_.”

Kylo glances down his hands, his arms: holding the other man’s head against Kylo’s ribs, crushing his windpipe with an elbow. He releases Finn, who straightens, coughing but defiant.

“Get on your bike. Can’t trust you alone. We’re _all_ going after her,” he snaps, vaguely angry with himself for his mindless lapse into violence. Just like when he’d struck the girl. _Rey_. Backhanded her so hard he’d jarred her concussed brain into unconsciousness.

 _Your parents must’ve really hated you_.

She doesn’t know him. She doesn’t know anything about him. Ignorant scavenger. She doesn’t know anything. Parasite—

 _Fuck_ , the gasoline canisters!

Hux is there before him, quicker without the torturing, roiling burden of Kylo’s anger. “She’s taken another one. A full one,” he says, and there’s a quiet, sneering triumph in his voice that spikes Kylo’s blood pressure, makes him want to squeeze his hands around the slimy bastard’s throat. Pointless brutality, but it would make him feel better. Maybe. Had he felt better after backhanding the girl? He can’t remember. But it had shut her up, that chapped mouth spitting vitriol and defiance. Stopped her talking. Stopped those words— _your parents must’ve really hated you_ —until the next time someone slips up, says something about—

“ _I said shut up!_ ”

“Um...no one’s talking…” Mitaka, staring at him in the full flood of the quad bikes’ headlights. Everyone’s mounted up except for him, raging at nothing like an angry child.

And that just pisses him off even more, that they’ve seen him lose control. _Again_.

He strides over to his quad, slings a leg over the seat and jams his fist down on the ignition. The bike roars to life, shaking beneath him from the force he’s unleashed on it, headlights flickering with the vibrations, serrating the desert into quivering lines of light and dark as they tremble. He opens the throttle, and this is better, speeding off into the half-light, and she is _not getting away_.

“Sir, where are we going?” Phasma shouts through her helmet, drawing up alongside him, almost crashing her bike against his when he ignores her, bending lower of his speedometer, urging the engine faster, _faster_. “Do you know where we’re going? Because if we’re abandoning the only known drinking water in a thousand miles, just so you can chase some little whore—”

“She was coming from the east,” he yells back, swearing and jerking his bike away from Phasma’s wheels, outfitted with spikes she’s designed to cut down anyone who gets too close by sharpening extra stakes from their tarp. “Before she knew we’d be tracking her. She won’t have gotten far.”

“That’s what you said last time! And she was fucking _miles_ away, with a damned concussion to slow her down!”

So, yeah, the scavenger’s strong. Maybe stronger than she knows. But she’s on foot, and injured so she’s not exactly fit to run. Whereas he’s got a military-grade, ultra fuel-efficient quad bike that can outpace pretty much anything, and his chin’s already scabbed over. Not that Finn has asked.

“And this time, she’s got the gasoline!” Hux shouts.

Which should just slow her down further. At full capacity, the canisters are solid metal and goddamn heavy. But he doesn’t trust her. Because if she’s taking their fuel, that means she’s got something to fuel up.

“The longer it takes to find her, the more dangerous she becomes!” he bellows back.

“Wait, wait, wait!”

Finn, that asshole, letting her get away with her gear, treating her like she was some sort of guest with stitching her up and giving her extra water; he probably would’ve fed her, too, if Kylo hadn’t demanded to check his rations.

“Listen, guys. Listen! We’ll hear her if she’s using anything with an engine, right? If she keeps still and she’s out of range from our headlights, we could blow right by her. We’ve just gotta wait for her to use whatever she’s fueling up. She’s concussed, probably not thinking straight, so she’s not gonna try some strategy where she waits to see if we’ll go out of hearing range, then start up whatever she’s got. We just have to wait. Just listen. Cut our ignitions. Let her think we’ve stopped chasing her.”

Kylo’s initial reaction is to hammer on his quad’s accelerator. But...even coming from Finn, it’s not a bad plan. Not great. There are plenty of ways she could slip through his fingers again with this tactic. And he has his suspicions about Finn’s loyalties. Water and zip-ties, stitching up her scalp. But...it’s also not the worst idea. He eases off the gas and Mitaka almost collides with his bike, tires squealing as he punches the brakes. The kid doesn’t dare curse him out, even behind the protection of his visor.

“Fine,” he says to the others, killing his ignition and headlights. The sudden silence is thunderous, his pulse roaring in his ears from charged adrenaline. He’s breathing hard, even just sitting here. He’s glad he’s got his helmet to hide his face, hide the fact that he’s panting. He tries to quiet his heaving shoulders. “And keep your voices down.” His words come out metallic-sounding and cold from behind his visor. Good.

So they wait.

And they wait. If Finn’s giving her time to escape—and Kylo doesn’t know who to trust right now, with Hux being a slippery fucker and Phasma starting to question his decisions—he’ll kill him.

Waiting still. It seems like hours. Mitaka shifts on his bike, leather squeaking, the soft sound ripping apart the desert’s pre-dawn stillness. Kylo could strangle him for it, is half-turning on his quad, when—

 _Rrr_. _Rrrrrrr_. _Rrrrrr...rrrrrrr._

East. Just like he’d thought. And she’s opened the throttle on whatever piece of shit she’s got running. Nothing he can’t outflank on his quad, from the way her engine’s sputtering. Sand in the gas tank, probably.

He’s off in a spurt of gravelly earth, demanding everything his quad has for speed, heading straight into the rising sun. The others fall into formation behind him, bikes growling across unforgiving terrain. She must know he’s coming for her; there’s no way in hell that she doesn’t hear the roaring quads. He’d ironically nicknamed his _Silencer_ , back when that had seemed funny.

Okay, so it’s still kind of funny. He realizes that he’s grinning, a totally maniacal grin when the sun crests the hilltops and she comes into view, a dark sunspot against the day, rocketing along about a quarter mile ahead. What the hell is she riding? Not a quad, that’s for damn sure. Even from this distance, he can see that whatever she’s got is beat to shit, shaking and faltering as she punches the gas. It’s running, but only just. Kind of astounding, actually. And he can smile at that, because he’s rapidly gaining on her. He sees her head twist back, blue-tinted lenses on her goggles protecting half her face against spewing grit, then lean over her handlebars, urging her rust bucket on. _Faster!_ But there’s no way she can outrun him.

He doesn’t expect her to stop. He doesn’t want her to. He wants to run her down.

Kylo’s whole body sings with adrenaline, with the thrill of a hunt, of outrsipping the others in pursuit. He couldn’t wipe the grin off his face if he tried.

She’s only a hundred yards ahead, laboring over her bike, coaxing it with a cursing monologue that he can hear even through the cacophony of their chase—it’s a two-wheeler, made for agility rather than the quad’s brute force—when she gives a sudden wrench to the handlebars. Her bike makes a horrible screeching sound of metal peeling against metal, the wheels slide so far out from under her that she’s almost horizontal, and then she’s upright again with another squeal and shooting toward him like a damn javelin.

With four thick tires and tail-heavy weight, his quad’s not meant for maneuverability; she’s using that against him.

 _Fuck_ , she’s smart, too. And really, really good on a bike.

He can’t turn his quad fast enough before she speeds past him, so close he can see her bloody wrists, obviously dislocated thumbs swollen to twice their normal size—so _that’s_ how she’d gotten loose—and count every streak of sweat inching down her face from beneath her goggles. She’s giving him the middle finger.

And he’s pissed, but insanely, he’s also laughing. _Touché_ , he thinks while sweaty breaths of laughter fog up his helmet visor, surprised by his own reaction. Admiration for her gutsy stunt—

But then there’s a bone-crushing _crunch_ behind him, plastic and metal colliding. Kylo rotates his quad so hard that it rocks onto two wheels, spinning in the dirt, almost amputating a foot he throws down for balance, and the whole scene’s laid out before him like a damn pop-up picture book:

Hux, Phasma, and Mitaka closing ranks to cut her off—

Finn waving his arms in a useless warning, helmeted head turning in horror—

Rey’s handlebars clipping a supply box strapped to the back of Mitaka’s quad, going too fast to react to the change in formation—

Her bike nose-diving and launching her into the air, somersaulting in nothingness—

She’s going to land on her feet like when she fought him with her staff—no, her rotation’s all wrong, she can’t control it, she’s just turning over and over, silhouetted against an iron sky—

Rey falls.

And she doesn’t get up.

—

The tarp’s familiar. She can feel its canvas brushing against the side of her neck. Rey’s getting used to waking up under it...but she can’t quite remember why. Experimentally, instinctively, she tries to twitch her wrists, her ankles. Not bound. For some reason, that strikes her as not good. And then she feels it—the half-paralyzing pain in her shoulder. Her right arm is strapped over her chest, elbow pinned to her ribs. It’s a feeling she knows from her work on her thumbs, multiplied by millions. Her shoulder’s dislocated.

Well, not anymore. How did she pull her own shoulder back into alignment? Strap herself up? She’s good at patching over her injuries, but even for her at her most ingenious and desperate, this is impossible...

“Look, she can move her fingers and toes. Probably no damage to her spine.”

“Might be easier if there was.”

“Shut up, Hux.”

Three voices.

 _Oh_.

Her memory’s a little hazy, but she remembers these voices. She’s heard them under this tarp before. She’d been on her bike for a while...and she crashed...she’s never crashed...and then it suddenly all comes flooding back.

 _Shit_.

What a stupid stunt. She’d panicked, concussion warping her mind, allowing instinct to supercede thought; instead of hiding in her dugout with her stolen gasoline, silent and still and waiting for the danger to pass, she’d run. She’d fueled up her bike in a desperate need to flee and opened the throttle. They’d heard her. They’d found her. And she’d given Kylo Ren the middle finger, too, because her body had overtaken her brain, or just because, and she hadn’t even been watching for the others coming up behind him…

“Hey, sunshine,” someone’s saying to her, distracting her, pulling her out of the memory. “See, she’s coming round.”

“That was a stupid stunt.” Someone else. _Him_. Kylo Ren.

She wants to tell him that she just said that...but maybe she didn’t, or he wasn’t listening. It’s rude that he won’t listen to her…

A hand on her face, a palm broad enough to hold or crush her whole skull. She groans, wishing he’d just get it over with. The hand withdraws. She frowns.

“I know you can hear me. _That was a stupid stunt_.”

“Yeah…” she admits to herself, or maybe she’s saying it out loud. “But it...pissed you off…”

A huff of breath. “And you almost got yourself killed.”

“Mmm.” She tries to nod. Stops. She can feel herself slipping away, jarred loose with her nod, but something in her brain is telling her that unconsciousness is bad, that she shouldn’t give into it, even if it feels better...or maybe it’s the medicine man talking. Finn? A nice voice…

With a colossal effort, Rey opens her eyes. Someone has wiped grit off her eyelids.

But it’s not Finn taking up space in her vision, demanding her focus. It’s Kylo Ren. Of course.

“Why?” she asks him, not bothering with other words.

He knows, damn him. He knows what she means like he’s reading her mind. “Because you have something I want. And I take what I want.”

“Yeah...you’ve said.” She gathers herself for defiance, which takes so much energy that she doesn’t have. “I’m still not taking you there. Could show you on a map, though.”

“I don’t have a map.”

“No map? But you’re military...right? Boy-scout. Gotta be prepared...’S just paper and lines. Can use it to keep off the sun…”

“Oh, we had maps.” Hux, she thinks. Doesn’t like his voice. “Until some fuck-up with a temper burned them.”

She twitches the corner of her lip, like it’s funny. Of course Kylo Ren doesn’t have a map. Of course he burned it. Idiot…

When she comes back around, they’re arguing. She keeps her eyes closed, and she listens.

“We’re not taking this bitch with us. She’s going to slow us down and make us burn through gasoline faster. Added weight on the bikes. If you somehow didn’t notice, hers is smashed to shit, and she put a dent in Mitaka’s quad. Oh, and who’s going to give up rations to feed her? You?”

“If she won’t tell us how to get to Takodana, then we’re taking her with us. I’ll keep her on my bike, and we’ll go in turns with splitting the rations.”

Why...does he think she knows something good about Takodana...it’s just the same as everywhere else...no…. _worse_...

“Not mine. Give the parasite your own damn protein.” The tarp rustles as someone moves from beneath it, angry steps receding across the baked desert floor. Whoever it is, they won’t get far in the midday heat.

“That’s not going to work, sir,” the woman in the group says. There’s a weight of authority in her voice that the mucid man doesn’t have. Voice too slippery to take the weight…

“It will—”

“That’s not going to work for _me_. For _us_.”

“This isn’t a democracy!”

“No. It isn’t,” she replies, and there’s a venom in her words that makes Rey’s skin crawl.

A few minutes of simmering silence pass, thicker than the desert air that Rey struggles to breathe.

And then—“What the _fuck_ , Hux?”

“You’re not willing to extract the information from her, if she even has anything. I am.”

“You can’t—” Finn, sucking in his breath.

“Get out of the way.”

Another venomous hiss.

Shrill instinct screams. Rey’s eyelids snap open.

Beady, glistening eyes. A flat, triangular head. A coiling tan body marked with brown stripes, the tail shaking. _Rattling_.

A juvenile rattlesnake, suspended above her with Hux’s greasy fingers gripping it behind its evil, swiveling head. It couldn’t make a non-venomous bite if it wanted to. More dangerous than an adult, where half of all bites are dry. She can’t look away while it tastes the air, forked tongue flicking over its slitted nostrils. Curved fangs overhang its jaw.

“Rattlesnake venom induces delirium,” Hux says while the snake twists in his grip, scaly body not yet strong enough to break his fingers’ pinch. His voice is oily, his eyes as glossy as the reptile’s, hypnotized with watching the snake curl between his fingers. “She’ll be very...suggestible. She’ll give anything to make it stop.”

The next few moments happen so fast that her brain doesn’t have time to process the sudden influx of motion and information. Hux extends the snake until it rattles itself over her head, glistening eyes reflecting her own petrified stare back at her. His mouth twists in a small, sick smile, enjoying this triumph—but then a huge, sun-freckled hand closes over Hux’s wrist, moving faster than Rey imagines even the snake could strike, and Kylo Ren is yelling something, forcing Hux’s arm up and away from her face—“Don’t you _fucking_ dare!”—and Hux is still smiling, like he’s anticipated Ren’s rage, like it gives him the most satisfaction, the most pleasure he’s had in _years_ , and he just...opens his hand.

The rattlesnake twists as it falls, a graceful coil within the air, some writhing serpent within the depths of an ocean. It lands in the center of Rey’s chest. It’s surprisingly heavy for such a tiny thing, she considers, because her brain has decided that anything is better than thinking about what’s going to happen next. Any second now. Above her, Ren releases Hux so quickly that the man slumps and staggers, and Ren’s bending down toward her, hand extended—

 _What the hell are you doing? Don’t touch it!_ she wants to scream, but she doesn’t, because she can’t breathe; any movement in her chest will startle the snake into striking. It’s already lifting its ugly, cuneate head, rearing back on its gyrating body. But then Ren’s motion above it catches its attention, and it swivels, hissing and rattling, and—

The snake strikes once into the air, missing Ren’s wrist by millimeters. She can’t help it: Rey’s panic twitches over her skin. And it strikes again, into her forearm. Faster than her eyes can track, it pierces the vulnerable flesh inside the elbow strapped across her chest.

Its fangs are tiny, and they don’t even hurt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Oh look, it's a hacked-together mood board](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/image/172664028745)!
> 
> If you're enjoying Sun, Sand, and Stone, tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Our boy makes some questionable choices.

The rattlesnake’s skull offers hardly any resistance to his boot. Kylo doesn’t remember snatching it off Rey and crushing it under his heel. He’d just...acted. But right now, he wants to strangle Hux and he wants Finn to administer the medkit’s antivenom to the glassy-eyed girl on the ground, so he fucking _multitasks_ , yelling instructions at Finn while he’s got an arm crushing down on Hux’s windpipe from behind.

“Sir.” Phasma. Ordinarily he’d ignore her, because he’s a little busy, but there’s something sharp and metallic tracing against his jugular with very precise, very clinical strokes. She’s always liked her knives.

A considering beat. Then he drops Hux, who collapses from Kylo’s grip onto his knees, coughing and wheezing.

“Better.” Phasma’s blade lifts.

He debates his next move for exactly one second, then turns to Finn. “Where’s the damn antivenom?”

“It’s...it’s...it’s in here, I know it is…” Finn’s crouched over his medic bag, pawing through the supplies. Sweat glistens down the sides of his face from his curled hair, making a dark yoke on his collar.

“ _Find_ _it!_ ”

“I guess Mitaka dosed himself with the last of it when he wiped his ass on a cactus and thought he’d gotten shanked by a diamondback,” Hux says, still kneeling and massaging his mottled throat. It’s not an unreasonable scenario, but malevolence gleams in his pale eyes. He’s enjoying this, watching Kylo fume.

Watching him afraid.

He’s not scared. He’s just really _fucking_ mad. This girl’s information is _his_. Once he’s claimed something, taken something for himself, no one touches it. _No one_.

Another frantic minute of upending the medkit, and Finn’s hands are empty. There’s no antivenom in the bag.

“Aren’t you supposed to keep an inventory of this shit? What’s the _point_ of you?”

Finn darts an agonized look at the girl. “I did. I do. I…but there’s nothing in here.”

Fuck. _Fuck!_

“Rey.” Kylo crouches down and tilts her head, drawing her attention from where she’s been staring cross-eyed at her arm, at the tiny puncture marks in her skin. So small, they’re barely bleeding. Her eyelids droop. She flinches at his touch, but she’s clearly trying to keep very still, slowing the venom’s spread toward her heart. “Rey, you—”

“I know how this goes,” she whispers, visibly trying not to breathe, to keep her pulse low. “First comes the pain.” She hesitates, then nods very slightly, checking off that box. “Tiredness. I’ll wake up delirious and thirsty. Then unconsciousness. Then death.”

“You’ve got something I want, so you’re not allowed to die yet.”

Her lips hitch in something that could be a smile, and he’s reminded of her jutting middle finger on the dirt bike. “Thanks. I think.”

“There’s nothing you can do,” Mitaka says from behind him. “I’m sorry if I took the last antivenom, but it’s gone. Shouldn’t we use the time she’s got left?”

“Isn’t that what we should do, _sir_? Isn’t that what you want to do? Get the information?” Hux leers, raspy and triumphant. “Or has the objective changed?”

Rey’s looking up at him, but Kylo’s not sure she can see him anymore. The hazel in her eyes is opaque, like there’s a thick pane of glass between them. Yes, he wants the information she has. It’s what he’s been trained to do—extract information. He’s learned languages and code words, histories so that he knows when the information he takes is drivel or valuable intel. Tako-dana: _green place_ in the Kanata dialect, a language known for its simple linguistic explicitness and lack of imagination in naming conventions. And he knows she’s hiding something about this place. He needs her information if he’s going to survive and escape the desert, as he’s been ordered to do.

Kylo prefers style in his interrogations, but if it’s true that Hux’s methods have always been crude, they’ve also been effective.

Maybe it’s a test from the watching presence in the back of his mind: who will win, getting the necessary information in this scenario?

“Are you going to make her talk, or shall I?” Hux inquires with poisonous politeness.

Kylo doesn’t even bother answering him. “Rey,” he says to her.

She blinks. Mumbles. Her eyelids descend to half-mast, then fall. Her tongue swipes across her lips.

“Thirst,” Phasma says, nodding over his shoulder. He fights the urge to plow his elbow into her stomach, to force her to back off.

“And now we have to wait for delirium to set in. Shouldn’t be long.” Hux sighs, like waiting is the biggest inconvenience of his day. “If you hadn’t been so quick with yelling for the antivenom, we could’ve used the dose as leverage. If she talks, she gets the serum. If not...” He rolls his eyes back in his head until they gleam white. Disgusting.

“We don’t have any antivenom,” Kylo spits between his teeth.

“She didn’t know that until you spilled the news.”

Before he can retort, the girl’s lips flutter. She moans.

“Oh, good,” Hux says. “Now run your interrogation, _sir_ , or someone else will.”

Kylo ignores him. “Rey,” he says again. “Can you hear me?”

“Yeah…” Her breathing is so faint.

“Her blood pressure’s dropping.” Finn frowns over her wrist, fingers taking her feeble pulse.

“Not a lot of time, sir.”

Kylo doesn’t even look round. “Not helping, Phasma. Rey, tell me about Takodana.”

She shivers. Her head shakes—denial, or a muscle spasm from the venom working its way through her body. “No...please…”

“You need to tell me, Rey.”

“I don’t want...don’t want to go back...please…”

“You don’t have to go back.” He’s not lying. She’s not going to survive. This truth makes him brutal, with himself and with her. “But I need to know. How do I get to the green place?”

“Green room.” And then she screams, high and terrified, the scream she must’ve been holding inside her all this time while rattlesnake venom pulses along her arteries. “No! No no _nononononono_ please...please! Don’t make me. D-don’t hurt her! I’ll be g-good this time, I promise, I promise, just please, please don’t _pleasedon’tpleasedon’tplease_ —”

He’s shaking her, trying to thrash her loose from her delirium, her nightmare, but he’s pushing her, breaking her, hurting her, and he hates himself for it— “Rey, where is Takodana?”

Her eyes fly open. Her pupils have dilated so far that they’re caverns, sucking away the noonday light, swallowing everything, opening into something terrible and he’ll fall right into her, he can’t stop himself—

“Hell,” she whispers. And then her body goes rigid, spine arching up, neck bones crackling. Tremors start in her feet, creeping up her legs.

“And...she knows fuck-all.” Hux dusts his palms against his thighs. “There’s no such thing as a green place, _sir_. Kanata’s a damn useless dialect. Something a kid could make up. Small wonder the bastards who spoke it got exterminated.” He stands.

Something clinks in his pocket.

Finn gets to him first, tackling Hux in a bull-like rush so that the man’s right side slams into the ground. Hux’s skull thuds down with a satisfying crack. Elbow planted against his throat, Finn’s hand dives into Hux’s clinking left pocket, coming out with two antivenom vials.

“You motherfucker,” he says quietly, and Kylo’s never considered Finn to be either particularly useful or profane, but suddenly he’s got a new respect for the man. Finn grinds his elbow down into Hux’s neck. “I’ve always known you were a sick bastard, Armitage Hux, but this...this is really something. You were gonna let her die because you didn’t want to share a couple of shit protein bars which, by the way, you hate, because they _taste like shit!_ ” His voice spirals higher and higher, his elbow a pestle, halfway to hysterical, but his grip is gentle and steady around the vials.

The revolt’s happened so fast, but now Phasma’s recovering from her surprise, reaching for her knife—Kylo kicks her hard in the side of the knee with his steel-toed boot. She goes down, cursing and clutching her leg.

Finn continues, “You know what I’d like to do, _Armitage_? I’d like to reach down your throat, pull up your slimy guts, twist them around your neck, and hang you from Rey’s staff, here. Hell, I’d hold the staff across my shoulders with you hanging from one end. You’d be heavy to keep up like that while you choked to death on your own vomit, but it would be a fucking _pleasure_ to pull a muscle for you, just to see your legs twitch.” He lifts his elbow and Hux rolls over, gasping. “But you know what? I’m not gonna do any of that, because I took a hippocratic oath to _do no harm_.”

Finn strides back under the tarp, grabs a hypodermic needle from his medkit, peels it out of its sterile packaging, draws it full with the antivenom, and injects Rey’s quivering arm with a complete dose. Again. And again. Three doses, and Rey quiets.

“We’ll stay here until she can travel,” Kylo says. His tongue is stiff, his voice clumsy.

“I don’t agree.” Phasma’s testing her weight on her injured leg, glaring at him.

“This is not a democracy,” he repeats.

“No,” she answers. “This is no longer an _anything_. Hux, get your ass off the ground. Mitaka, the bikes. Finn, get your kit. You were a shit team leader in the compound, Ren, never listening when someone had a better idea than you, or accepting that maybe you weren’t God’s damn gift to mankind, that maybe other people knew more than you did. The General might not’ve seen it, but I did. I have. And out here, with no one around to prop up your shitty execution, you’ll be dead so fast it’s not even worth expending the energy or a bullet to kill you in this heat. But if you show up at the pond again, I’ll make the effort.” Limping, she stalks away from the tarp.

Finn doesn’t follow.

“Hippocratic oath,” he mutters, sinking down beside Rey.

“Finn!” Phasma barks. “Now!”

Finn shakes his head. “I’m not going back.” Kylo can taste the other man’s fear, sees the way Finn’s eyes flick anywhere but to Phasma, but he doesn’t move.

“Soldier 2187, to your post!”

“No. You’ve always said I’m a shit medic, so take the kit if you want. Mitaka can stitch you up and diagnose whatever diseases you pick up, even if he can’t tell the difference between a poke from a cactus and a diamondback strike. But I’m not going.”

A moment, heavy with sweat and impatience. Then,

“Fine. Mitaka, get the medkit.”

Finn kicks it to him.

The quads roar to life. Hux, Phasma, and Mitaka are gone in a blink of blinding sun.

Another moment.

Beside Kylo, Finn starts to shake, and he’s wondering if he’s going to have to slap the hysterics out of the man until the shaking bursts through into laughter. Finn wipes at tears streaming down his face, still chuckling. “Well, at least they left us our own quads.”

“They have the medkit. We’re dead out here without it!”

Finn has the audacity to grin at him. It’s a smile built to illustrate the word _chipper_. There’s no damn reason for him to be smiling like that. They’re so fucking _screwed_. And the whole thing suddenly seems a lot more pointless, when they don’t have access to the reservoir anymore. What does it matter if Rey recovers from the rattlesnake venom? They’ll all just die of thirst, even if she somehow does agree to lead them across the desert and over the impossibly distant mountains to Takodana. To the green she’s mentioned. Green place, green room—semantics. In Takodana, there’s something green.

But she’s not likely to lead them willingly, given her reaction. _Hell_ , she’d said. At that point, he’d been more concerned with getting her the antivenom, keeping her heart going, than on extracting coherent instructions or navigation coordinates.

But Finn’s still smiling. “They don’t, actually. Well, technically they have the _bag_.”

“What?” Oh, the medkit. He must be dehydrated, getting distracted so easily. Dizzy, too, though the snake didn’t get a strike on him. Rey’s body still quivers from time to time, but the pained creases marking her mouth and forehead have smoothed out. Still unconscious. Probably for the best. Kylo snaps, harsher than he intends, “All our supplies were in the bag.”

 _Idiot_.

“Nope.” Finn shakes his head. He digs into his pocket, pulling up a handful of gauze, a bottle of antiseptic iodine, aloe vera for sunburn, and a toothbrush. He blinks down at this last item, then grins again. “Aww, hell. I didn’t mean to grab this.”

“What the _shit_?”

Finn just shrugs, since there’s little acidity behind Kylo’s words, no threat of fingers closing around his windpipe with the invective. “Yeah, well I didn’t have a lot of time to plan out what to take. I was just stuffing anything small into my pockets while everyone else was yelling about the antivenom.” He pauses, examining the toothbrush, not looking at Kylo, who finds that he’s also weirdly mesmerized by the instrument. Three of them, and one toothbrush. “Did you think this was gonna to end up any other way?”

Kylo thinks, still staring at the bristles.

 _No_ , is his honest answer. In fact, it’s a wonder the First Order team lasted together as long as it did. Surviving the desert and each other. They’d needed each other. There hadn’t been a choice. But…

“There’s no water except what we’ve got in the canteens. It’ll last us twelve hours, if we’re careful. Then we’ll have to go back to the pond, or—”

“ _She’s_ alive.” Finn reaches out and brushes away a damp curl of hair that’s stuck on Rey’s chapped lips, parted to draw in sweltering air but breathing more easily. He takes her pulse, nods at its strength.

Kylo folds his mouth against a retort. Finn’s the medic, so he can touch her this way. Kylo’s never had more than the absolute basics of medic training. He’s always been the one to make the damage, not mop it up. Against his will, his eyes find the injuries on Rey’s wrists from his zip-ties, her swollen thumbs, the dried sanguine fluid smearing her forearms and the backs of her hands from making a blood-sleeve to slip her restraints. It’s moisture she can’t have afforded to lose. And he feels _useless_.

“She’s alive,” Finn repeats, “and she wasn’t anywhere near the pond. She would’ve had to come every day if she’d been using it for her water source. We would’ve known about her a lot sooner. So—”

“There’s other water out there,” Kylo cuts him off, masking his relief with a scowl. “And she knows where it is.”

Finn hesitates, watching him through narrowed eyes. “...Yeah.”

“When should she be conscious?”

“Nope, you’re not interrogating her again. Look what you did last time.”

Kylo slams his fist against the ground, which hurts like a bitch, like punching a concrete wall. “We need to know—”

“Yeah, we do. But you’re not going to do the asking. It’s pretty important for us to find out where the water is, and soon, and I think she’ll tell me quicker than she’d tell you. She really doesn’t like you,” Finn finishes blandly.

Kylo’s aching fist curls again. He’s never cared about being _liked_. “If she won’t talk? What then? How will you make her tell you? Didn’t you take your hippocratic oath?”

A humorless laugh escapes from Finn. “No. That’s for doctors, from _before_. I said that because it sounded good. Hux hates it when someone else uses big words or takes moral high ground. I just wanted to piss him off.”

“Well, nicely fucking done.”

“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

To which Kylo has…no response.

They sit under the tarp for a while in sweating silence while the sun boils the air overhead. It’s over one hundred degrees in the canvas shade, and probably one hundred thirty in the open. They’re both thirsty; trying to moisten their lips only scratches the undersides of their tongues with sharp, peeling skin, but they don’t drink. Finn takes the time to cut strips from his gauze and splint Rey’s thumbs. Her forehead deepens in a grimace when he knots the bandages and her left joint makes an unsettling _pop_ , but she doesn’t wake. He washes her abraded wrists with judicious drops of iodine.

Kylo watches him while he works. And he watches her, eyelids fluttering, pale crescents against her tanned face. She must never close her eyes. She must never sleep.

She’s...a puzzle. He’s not good at puzzles. He’s never been patient enough to unravel them, fit them together into something with meaning. When his impatience derailed an interrogation, though, his threats of injury usually turned the tide in a terrified, cooperative direction. But he’d bet that Finn’s just _great_ with puzzles, probably did them with a grandmother before he joined the First Order’s unit, surrounded by cats and stale cake and doilies, or some shit. That stupid picture makes him angry, and he’s too hot to be angry, so he lies down with his back to Finn and the girl and glares at the tarp’s stakes, glinting metal that would blister his skin if he touched it. Sunlight slides along their lengths, making a lance against his eyelids, so eventually he half-lowers them...

“Oh, good, you’re awake!”

“I wasn’t asleep,” he says immediately, sitting up so fast his head reels. Shadows have drawn out from the tarp’s peak so that a gray reflection of their shelter stretches east in long, distorted lines. Kylo’s mouth is full of grit, and he exhales a puff of dust when he coughs.

The corners of Finn’s eyes twitch, as if he’s restraining himself from rolling them. He turns back to Rey, who’s looking blearily up at him, blinking slowly. “How do you feel?”

Her eyebrows move a skeptic millimeter. “I’ve...had better days.”

“You thirsty?”

A nod.

Finn fishes his dented canteen from his backpack. It sloshes in a heavy, reassuring way, mostly full. He unscrews the cap and tilts it into Rey’s mouth. She moans. She closes her eyes as lukewarm water sloshes over her teeth from sucking against the rubber nipple. Swallowing, she flicks her tongue over her lips to snatch moisture beading there, darting against the corners of her mouth.

Despite what he’s said about being careful, about conserving water, Kylo grabs his own canteen with a shaking hand and takes a long drink with his head angled away. His face is burning. He’s just dehydrated.

“Better?”

Finn’s asking Rey, thank god.

“Yeah.”

“You can have more later, if you can keep this down. Can’t have you vomiting.”

She snorts. Her voice is stronger, sounding less like barbed wire’s caught in her throat when she says, “That’d be such a waste. I ate a really nutritious scorpion the other day. Lots of vitamins.”

Well, fuck if she isn’t _sarcastic_.

“Desert cuisine,” Finn quips back, and Rey snorts again. “I’ll take your scorpion over protein ration bars any day.”

“The ginger man wouldn’t like you making that trade,” she says. Her tone is light if a bit raspy, but her eyes swivel, finding Kylo in the shadows. “Or the others.”

“It’s just us, now,” Finn tells her. “They’re not big on scorpions, Hux, Phasma, and Mitaka, so…”

She arches an eyebrow in Kylo’s direction.

“Oh, and him. Yeah.”

“I tried to get the snake off you.” The words spill out before Kylo can check them. “I didn’t want—”

Her face freezes and she cuts him off, barely moving her lips. “Right. Still made use of it, though, didn’t you?”

“You were—”

“I was delirious. Doesn’t mean I don’t remember what happened.”

That’s the thanks he gets for trying to save her life? _Fuck_ this girl and her hazel eyes. Kylo takes another sloppy gulp from his canteen, screwing the cap on like it’s done him a personal injury.

“So, what now?” she’s asking Finn, ignoring Kylo and his canteen, though her tongue traces her lips again with obvious thirst.

“Well...that’s kind of up to you, sunshine,” he says.

She makes a skeptical hum in her throat.

“We’ve got our canteens, but we’re gonna to burn through our water supply pretty fast out here. We can’t go back to the pond.”

“Because of the others,” she prompts him, catching on.

“Yeah. So unless we find another water source, none of us are gonna make it very long.”

Kylo can see her thinking. She has a face which reveals every flicker of thought, every pulse of emotion in the curl of her mouth, the way her straight eyebrows contract or lift, as though her sun-kissed skin is translucent and he can watch her work through her available scenarios, half-calculating, half-instinctive. Clever and feral. A bit lethal. It’s...fascinating.

He makes himself look away, pulling his own mouth into a scowl. A safe expression.

Finally, she says, “I’m not telling you the way.” _You could just leave me here to die once you had what you wanted from me. It’s what I’d do in your place_. “But I’ll take you there when the sun starts to go down, when we can travel without getting sunstroke. I’ll take you there for the next dose of antivenom. I’ll need another injection in about an hour.”

“I would’ve given it to you anyway,” Finn protests, still on his high horse about the hippocratic oath.

“You shouldn’t. _He_ wouldn’t.” Rey jerks her chin at Kylo, meeting his scowl without flinching. “There’s always a price, isn’t there? It’s better that way. No debt. No one owes anyone else. That’s how you survive.”

And he realizes that she’s asking him. She’s asking him for this bargain so she won’t owe anything to him or to Finn. _What the hell is her problem?_ he’s demanding to himself, even while something in his chest tightens. She’s made a way for them all to get what they want. No one has to die for it. They all survive.

What he’s feeling...it’s respect.

“Deal,” he says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're enjoying Sun, Sand, and Stone, tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Our girl has some boys over.

She has to leave her dirt bike behind. Its front wheel’s bent sideways from the impact of her crash, broken spokes sticking out at odd angles. The body’s cheap plastic is shattered, exposing the bike’s gears and oil-slicked guts. Chips of silver polyethylene litter the ground, coated with a blue dust from the bike’s shattered headlight. Rey’s good with her hands, with mechanical things, with coaxing them to run out of a discarded garbage heap or the landfill, then run just a little longer—just long enough—but even she can’t fix this. If she had a soldering iron, she could weld the tank back together, but it’s been split open like a rotted orange, a shadow staining the ground from her hard-won gasoline leaking away. And without a tank, the bike’s useless.

So she abandons it, because there’s nothing else she can do. The flicker of sadness clutching under her breastbone is totally disproportionate to the facts. She’s not crying. She’s not that stupid, wasting precious tears when she’s already sweated more than she should.

But losing one more thing when she’s eked out so little that’s her own—it hurts.

Finn wisely doesn’t mention her stunt during their encounter earlier today—god, how is it possible that this is the same day?—when he helps her limp past the wreckage to his quad. She can feel Ren’s glare on the back of her neck, hot as a sunburn, but he doesn’t order Finn to hand her over, to ride with him so he can separate her from the medic, so they can’t plot an escape together.

It’s not like they could outrun him, with her weight added on Finn’s quad.

Instead of dropping her onto the bike, Finn shrugs out of his jacket and uses its arms like a sling, helping her onto the quad behind him, catching her around the middle with the back of the jacket, and knotting its arms around his waist. She’s tucked between his shoulder blades, face shielded from flying grit, her dislocated shoulder splinted securely against his back.

“All snug?” he asks.

She wrinkles her nose where it’s pressed into his armpit while he drops a helmet over his head and lowers the visor, which is slashed with red discoloration from some hard impact on the plastic. How is he still alive? He’s too kind for the desert, he and his hippocratic oath, whatever that is. He’s too good to be yoked to a man like Kylo Ren.

Or her.

“Good enough,” she mutters.

“Okay. So, where to?” His voice comes out muffled by the helmet.

“East.”

There’s a thrill to riding the quad, she has to admit guiltily to herself. It’s heavier than her bike, but smoother so that she doesn’t even scream at the vibrations wracking her strapped shoulder. And it’s _fast_. Where her dirt bike topped out at around 45 mph before starting to rattle itself loose from its bolts, the quads hit a steady pace around 60 mph without a single squeal of metal or an acid stench from burning rubber. It only takes fifteen minutes until Rey elbows Finn to slow down; they’re almost here.

“Where?” Ren asks from behind his own helmet, drawing up.

“Just ahead.” Her voice croaks from the dust.

“There’s nothing there.”

“That’s how it’s supposed to look,” she scoffs. Scoffing hurts her throat, but it’s worth it to see his shoulders jerk, taken aback. Rey fumbles with Finn’s knotted jacket until she can make a wobbly dismount from the quad. The ground quivers under her.

 _Weird_.

Ren doesn’t move to dismount, keeping his engine running. Like he’s prepared to chase her down if she runs. He’s got a pretty high opinion of her stamina; Rey’s ready to drop.

“The desert looks flat, but it isn’t. That’s why it’s so easy to get lost. Disoriented.” She stagger-strides away from the quads, trying to balance while the ground keeps shifting around on her. “It’s hard to hide, but it’s harder to navigate. So long as you don’t give away your position…you can be so invisible it’s like you’re not here. Nothing.” Her tongue’s flopping behind her teeth, and she’s...she’s rambling, her head unbolted from her shoulders and her reason by the quad ride. But she’s in pain, and she’s terribly thirsty, and she’s so, so tired. She just wants to curl up in her little den carved into the side of the dry riverbed...curl up there and never move again.

Her bike.

She wants to cry.

But she needs to show them the water, if she wants her antivenom injection. She has to keep her bargain. Better, that way…

Suddenly, the heaving ground’s gone from under her shuffling, stumbling feet, and she’s rising, boneless, head falling back so that everything’s upended, and the sky is dusty gold...

“She’s going under again. Her blood pressure must’ve risen from the bike vibrations. There’s still venom in her body, even with the injections. Give her another dose.” The voice rumbles deep under her ear.

“You’re not going to wait until after we get the water?”

“Just give her the fucking antivenom, Finn.”

“Deal…” Rey whispers. This isn’t supposed to be the way their bargain goes. He’s right about the venom; she can feel her feet going cold, sort of tingly like before. Pulse accelerating, moving the poison along. But they had a bargain for her next injection...didn’t they? “Had a...deal…”

“I know,” his voice says. “Finn?”

“Just sterilizing the needle. Okay.”

A sting in her arm. Spreading out from the bite, the puncture, something else cold pulses in her veins, lapping through her body. Colder than her cold feet. “Ouch.”

“Still conscious?”

“No,” she says.

A grunt, as her body softens and her weight solidifies.

“Tell me about this water, Rey.”

She breathes, trying so hard. So hard to be conscious. Spite him. “’S...underground. Dry riverbed...but underneath the rocks...dig…ten paces ahead, three paces right...” She licks her lips, head lolling. “Please…”

She’s moving, weightless, drifting. She hurts. She decides not to open her eyes. Too dizzying, seeing the iron-blue ground and the sky like lion-skin.

“How’d she even _find_ this place?” Finn.

“Is the water there?”

A heavy sound, boots dropping down into the narrow channel of Rey’s riverbed. Nails scrabbling against earth and rock, prying up a stone. “Some moisture. We’re going to have to dig for it, like she said.”

“So dig.”

Handfuls of gritty soil scooped away, the earth growing pliant. And then, like a blessing to a condemned sinner—mud. A gasp from Finn, an echo of her own sound when her fingers had first filled with that treasured slop.

“Strain it. Use my...wraps…”

She’s laid down, the lengths of pale, gauzy fabric she wears unwrapped from her chest and shoulders with huge, light-fingered hands.

“She uses this to filter water from the mud.”

—

_Pack the mud densely into the center of the fabric. Pull the corners up around it. Twist the loose ends until they press down on the lump of silt at the bottom. Hold the kinked fabric tightly beneath your arm. Hold the mud ball over your bottle, or your mouth. Squeeze until the joints in your hands and fingers ache._

_You’ll get a trickle._

_Fifty drops, if you’re lucky._

_Swallow the silt, even if it makes you cough and your stomach heave. It could be nutritious. Hope that there aren’t any parasites in the water_ — _but what will you do, even if there are? You’ll drink. You have no other choice._

_Empty the cloth._

_Take another handful of mud._

_Repeat until you’re not thirsty anymore…_

_...or you’re too tired to carry on._

—

The tarp, again. Rey blinks, confused. It’s not peaked overhead, but stretched flat, like the sky. Which she can’t see.

“Hey, sunshine. Back again.” _Finn_.

“This is getting to be a pattern,” she mumbles. To her surprise, she can shift onto her left side and raise herself up to sitting without the threat of losing consciousness. The crown of her head brushes a familiar gritty surface. She’s...in her dugout; she’d hollowed her hole into the riverbank a few feet above the channel floor, just deep enough to hold her body if she curled her legs to her chest, just high enough that she could sit upright. Expending no more energy than was absolutely necessary in making this place. Her place. A full canteen sits beside her. She snatches it and gulps down other familiar grit. Muddy water from under her rocks.

It tastes like home.

But if she’s in her dugout, then so are they.

“This is where you’ve been living.” Ren’s too tall and too broad to fit comfortably under Rey’s earthen roof so he sits outside, leaning back against the opposite riverbank under the tarp, which is stretched across the dry river’s width. Finn’s half-leaning into the dugout, watching her eyes for the venom’s glaze, relief flickering over his mouth when she meets his look squarely.

Rey’s nothing if not economical, so to Ren and Finn both, she says, “Yeah.”

This place isn’t much, but it’s hers. A ratty blanket with more holes than thread, a few sheets of cardboard to keep her off the ground, and which she uses to block the dugout’s entrance when cold night winds come screaming down the parched river. Her cache of protein-rich food in a larder shelf she’s carved into the wall: snake jerky from a five foot-long rattler she’d beaten to death with her staff, gutted and filleted with a rock she’d hacked into a sharp cylinder. Stone age. She’d laid her strips of meat out to cure at noon, and they’d been dry by sundown; hopefully, the sun-baking removes any parasites, but it’s not like she can afford to be picky about what she eats. She also has the single gasoline canister stamped with a military logo that she’d stolen on her last regrettable run to the pond, though it’s not much use to her without her bike leaning against the dugout’s entry. And then there’s her scruffy satchel to hook from her belt or over her shoulder, with things too important to name inside it.

Undisturbed.

“How?” Ren asks her, following on with their discussion.

Rey shrugs at him, her shoulders asking, _what were my other choices?_

He seems to accept this. At least, he doesn’t challenge her with another question.

They sit in a silence that’s awkward and uncompanionable, which Rey’s determined not to break and Ren seems not to notice, absorbed in his own thoughts while he stares at the ground. It’s Finn who finally voices the next words, pertinent syllables that need to be spoken.

“So...can we stay here? With you? Not forever—just…” he trails off.

 _Until what?_ Rey wants to know. _Until what._

There’s no rulebook for this.

But it’s not like she can chase them away. Even if she could get to her staff, which is propped against the bank next to Ren and unreachable, there are two of them, and she’s not exactly in prime condition: one functional arm, and no functional thumbs. Ren sees her eyeing the staff anyway. Catching the turn of her thoughts, he flashes a grim smile.

Rey rolls her eyes and leans back against the dugout’s wall. “Okay. For now.”

—

Rey sleeps through most of the next couple of days, a heavy sleep where she’s hard to wake as her brain works at healing itself from its concussion and her scalp knits with scabs around Finn’s stitches. Finn rouses her anyhow. She has to be conscious to drink. In the long meanwhile, he and Kylo alternate working on the arduous process that converts mud beneath the river stones to drinking water, and in widening and deepening Rey’s north-facing dugout—the better to keep midday sun from burning in—until it accommodates three bodies. Temperatures are better regulated underground; the nights aren’t quite so cold, and the blistering heat isn’t so intense as beneath a tarp set up in the open.

Finn looks longingly at the jerky Rey’s cured, but Kylo confines them both to eating only their ordinary protein ration bars. He’s not a thief. Not like this, anyway.

When Rey wakes naturally on her own during the third or fourth day—it’s hard to keep track living like this, the waiting, the watching, the heat and the cold—she frowns at him where he’s squeezing mud into water outside the dugout, lifting the tarp occasionally to glance from under it, surveying the visible slice of desert for Finn’s return from a mile-wide perimeter scouting run that he’s enforced around Rey’s camp. It’s not an angry frown marking her face, just confused.

And for some reason, that makes his mouth twitch. Not a grimace. He settles back onto his crossed legs. He continues wringing the afternoon’s water from its mud over a canteen.

She stares at him for a good quarter hour while he ignores her, blinking like a burrowing owl, frowning, her nose scrunched. Then, suddenly—“Kylo Ren.”

He manages not to jump out of his skin, containing his reaction to raised eyebrows while he observes a dirty stream trickling into his bottle. It’s the first time she’s addressed him by name, her tongue curling around the sounds like she’s tasted something foul. He sounds tolerably calm, indifferent when he says, “Are we doing introductions again?”

She huffs through her wrinkled nose. “I think we got it all out pretty thoroughly the first time, don’t you?”

 _If you only knew the half of it_ , he thinks, but he’s not a total idiot, so he keeps quiet while she considers him with that little divot between her eyebrows. And he realizes that this is another first: the first time since their initial encounter that they’ve been alone together. He’s...not sure what to make of a thought like that, so he pushes it away. But his brain isn’t getting the message about shutting that box, and it supplies the next realization: right now, he and Rey aren’t actively working to kill each other.

“I’m trying to…” Rey flounders to a stop, the divot deepening. She draws a breath. “I’m trying to put the pieces of the last couple days together, and I’m coming up with something that I don’t…” She pulls her lip between her teeth.

Kylo drops his eyes back to the cloth he’s throttling. “A lot’s happened,” he says, as neutrally as he can.

“No shit,” she mutters, which makes his mouth twitch again. “I just don’t understand _why_.”

“Why what?” Immediately, he wishes he’d bitten off his tongue before asking.

“Why you…”

Oh yeah, this conversation is going nowhere good really fast.

“You had a concussion,” he cuts in. “It makes sense that you’re confused. You probably aren’t remembering things very clearly.”

“My memory’s fine,” she snaps, her little divot furrowing into a scowl, which is less impressive since it’s delivered down her nose at him, slightly cross-eyed. “But what I’m remembering doesn’t make sense. You know why it doesn’t make sense?”

He can’t help rising to the bait, even though he really, really doesn’t want to, knows it’s a bad idea, but he does it anyway, because he’s an idiot with no self-control. “Why?”

“Because _you_ don’t make sense.”

He bristles, face turning hot. “I make complete sense!”

Rey flutters an eyebrow and hitches herself up onto her side, resting on her good elbow. “No, you don’t. The first time we met, you tried to kill me. Then, barely twenty-four hours later, you risk getting bitten by a rattlesnake to—”

“I wasn’t trying to kill you.” The words just burst out, because how can she think that?

She scoffs. Her fingertips dust over her exposed throat, where vivid blue bruises from when he’d locked her staff against her windpipe are slowly blossoming into blacks and yellows. “No?”

“I wasn’t.” Kylo twists the cloth he holds with such force that a rip opens around the mud. “I wanted to know…who you were.”

“So instead of introducing yourself like a normal person, you attacked me.”

“If you hadn’t struggled—”

“That’s what happens when you’re being hunted by a creature in the dark. You fight back.”

“I thought you’d run.”

“I would’ve!”

“Why? I just wanted to know—”

“Because I was terrified! You came out of nowhere and grabbed me, and you’re the size and weight of a brick wall, and just about as strong, and all you say is that you’ve heard so much about me, which by the way is a really creepy and weird thing to mention when you’ve got someone in a chokehold—”

“I wouldn’t have put you in a chokehold if you hadn’t been struggling!”

Rey pushes herself up so that she’s sitting, hunching and curling her legs against her chest, chin resting on her kneecaps. But though she’s protecting all the vulnerable areas of her body, her posture so defensive he’s almost offended—half-feral and always ready to bite—she’s leaning toward him with those curious hazel eyes.

“I was taking your gasoline. Weren’t you angry?”

“Yeah, I was. And I didn’t believe it when I saw you. Mitaka had said a girl was doing the stealing—” Rey wrinkles her nose again at the nasty word— “but I didn’t expect her to be...you,” he finishes lamely.

“Huh.” Her snort is so scathing that Kylo imagines he can feel his brain cringe, gray matter crinkling in shame. “You were expecting someone stronger. Someone smart, and capable. Like the woman with you from the pond. And you got me, instead. Disappointed?”

“No.” Thank god he bites back the rest of his response.

“ _Ah!_ ” Rey uncurls enough to throw up a hand. “See? You don’t make sense. I’m not who you thought I was, so what do you even want from me, Ren?”

“I’ve told you. I want to know how you’ve survived.” He doesn’t mention Takodana. There’s time for that. Later.

She jerks her chin at the dugout, at the muddy water. “Like this.”

“No one can survive like this unless they know what they’re doing. Unless they’ve had training, or a shit-ton of practice. And you’re really young, too young for that. So who are you, Rey?”

“I’ve told you,” she echoes him. “I’m nothing.”

“Fine, be nothing if you want to be,” he grunts in frustration. “But I want to know where you learned to survive out here. No one should be able to do that. No one else can. Because—”

“Everyone else is dead,” she finishes for him. Her chin dips down, drawing her face into deeper shadow. Despite the heat, she shivers, and with that shiver, her mood changes so quickly that keeping up with her is like trying to catch ripples of wind in his hands. “I know. I didn’t see the smoke clouds, but I saw people with radiation poisoning on the roads and scavenging behind dumpsters, trying to get away. That’s when I knew it’d happened. I still don’t know where they were trying to go...the cities had the only food, the only water, even if it was radiation-soaked. People could’ve died without being thirsty, at least. And then those who got better got bigger guns and quicker tempers. They started killing off the sick ones and taking what they wanted. Then they just started killing...”

“Did you?”

Her head snaps up, eyes sharpening from her memory’s glaze, mood likewise snapping back to defensive fury. “Did I what?”

“Kill.”

Rey looks at him for a long time, considering him, visibly deciding if she’s going to bother answering him. He should be getting used to her looking at him like this, considering whether he’s worth her time with the balance slated pretty equally between _yes_ and _no_ , but he’s thinking about that middle finger on her busted dirt bike, so he just waits.

And _fuck_ , that was a really personal question to ask her, and he suddenly remembers why she’s staring back at him with barely contained rage. It’s sure as hell not because she’s remembering the incident with the bike, or the way her voice had softened when she’d thanked him just after the snake bit her.

“That’s a really personal question,” Rey says at last, her response so topical that he turns a humiliating shade of red from chest to ears; maybe he’d actually said those insane things aloud? No, because she’s still speaking, asking him something, and if she’d heard him say those stupid, stupid things, she’d be smacking him upside the head, dislocated shoulder and thumbs or no. “Why do you want to know?”

Why does it matter? He’s damn sure she’s capable of killing, and she’s got a temper. Is he hoping for one answer over the other?

_Yes, I have._

_No, I haven’t, and_ fuck _you, and the way you dream when you can’t help it—_

“Because I have,” he half-shouts, to drown out a voice that’s not even hers, making an echo so loud he’s going deaf, splitting his skull.

“Oh.” Rey cocks her head. “When?”

“ _When?_ That’s what you want to know? Not how many, or why, or—”

“Yeah, when. _When_ makes a difference in how I feel about it.”

So he answers her honestly, because he can’t think what else to do. “ _Before_.”

She digests that, reactions contouring her expressive face, passing too swiftly for him to identify them. Then, lacing her fingers over her chest, she nods. “Okay.  _Before_ is _before_.”

He’s absurdly relieved, and maybe that’s why he presses on too fast, high on her acceptance. “And you?”

Her splinted thumbs knock together and Rey stiffens. “Yes. _Before_.” Conversation over, she’s turned her face away, twisting her body so that all she gives him is the muscled curve of her strapped shoulder, the soles of her boots, but then—“ _Shit!_ ” She’s scrabbling at a ratty bag that seems to hold everything she values in the world, pawing through it until she comes up holding a flattish, chalky stone.

“How many days was I unconscious?”

“Uh...three, I think. Maybe four. It’s hard to keep track—”

“No, it isn’t! You just have to count! God _damn_ it! Three days, or four?” Her hands are shaking so hard that something clatters between her fingers, and he realizes she’s holding two stones: one flat and as broad as her palm, the other slender and sharp.

“Three,” he decide; it’s not as though she can contradict him on this.

“Three,” Rey repeats. She rubs her good arm across the flat rock, which marks a pale streak on her sun-bronzed skin. Holding the other slender stone like a stylus, she scratches something onto the first rock. She looks at it for a minute, then scrubs it out. She writes something else. Looks at it. Breathes. Erases it again. Only when she marks her stone for the third time does she lay it down, her face drawn with phantom pain.

“Four thousand, two hundred forty-seven,” she whispers.

 _Numbers_. She’s been scratching numbers.

“Four thousand, two hundred forty-seven what?”

“Days.”

“Why?”

“So I don’t forget when I’m awake. So I keep remembering. So it _means_ something.” She lifts her eyes from the chalk markings. Luminous and angry.

Their conversation replays at double speed through his head, and it hits him:

It’s been four thousand, two hundred forty-seven days since she killed, and she’s counted every single one. She’s made herself face down the days that she’s alive and another person isn’t. Because of her.

Those markings she makes are more awful than the nightmares he pretends not to have, because he can almost forget them during the day. Rey makes certain that she never forgets.

They don’t speak again until Finn returns from his scouting run, tired and thirsty. He offers a quick debrief on what he saw—nothing but a couple tarantula webs and a whole lotta sand—and then Finn and Rey talk in low voices while Kylo continues to squelch mud into water, hands cramped and aching. Finn’s convinced Rey to use some of his filched aloe vera for her sunburned cheekbones and has actually coaxed a half-smile from her by the time sunset fades behind the remote western mountains and they settle into the dugout for the night, Finn and Kylo in their sleeping bags, Rey wrapped in her scanty blanket. Finn seems about to offer to share his thermal sleeve with her, until Kylo’s glare puts paid to that idea.

If she’s cold, she can damn well say so.

He zips himself into his bag and stares hard at the dugout’s sloping wall. Finn’s to his right, with Rey on the far side, and the earthen hole is crowded: Rey curled into a fetal ball, Kylo so broad and long that his feet dangle out over the riverbed, and Finn filling the rest of their available space with snoring. He’s restless, and aching, and tired—a nasty combination. And his damn brain won’t stop niggling at him, reminding him that even though he hadn’t gotten answers from Rey about how she’s managed to survive on her own, how she’s learned the skills to do it, he’d successfully turned their conversation away from her investigation into everything Kylo doesn’t want her to know about him.

He should be pleased.

The pleasure feels hollow.

He’d said she’d been sleeping through her concussion for three days, but it could’ve been four. Four days—and if so, there’s a day that’s unaccounted-for on Rey’s chalk stone.

Kylo’s killed under orders. Because of that, he’d thought those deaths wouldn’t haunt him. He wasn’t the one to make the decisions; he’d just enforced them. He’d let them be enforced on him.

He’s been dead wrong.

As for Rey...who did she kill, four thousand, two hundred forty-seven or -eight days ago?

And _why_?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're enjoying Sun, Sand, and Stone, tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Earning this rating!

It’s the first night since Finn and Kylo Ren dropped themselves into her little patch of nothing that Rey falls asleep at a normal time—or as normal as she can judge when she’s mostly underground and the sky’s blocked out by a tarp. Her concussed head doesn’t ache so badly tonight; there’s no more than a background pulse behind her temples. Her thumbs twinge if she moves them without thinking, but she could almost grip onto her stylus today, so that’s something. Her shoulder’s stiff, and she’d like to rotate it, prevent her muscles from freezing and locking into place against the bone. Tomorrow, she’ll ask Finn to loosen the straps…

Well, she should be falling asleep. Her conversation with Ren has exhausted her, and she’s bone-weary in a way that few of her arduous trips through the desert have left her. Wrung out. But every nerve is alive, fireflies sparking under her skin, millions of tiny supernovas birthing and dying within her. She’s acutely aware of the two men sleeping nearby. Their bodies fill the dugout, which seems suddenly more cramped than before, though it’s more than three times as large from their efforts at digging back the rear and side walls. Their breath is heavy and humid against her face.

She’s not used to sleeping with other people around her anymore. The close press of bodies is too much like memory, which isn’t fair because she’s chalked her stone, accounted for her guilt, so why is it drowning her tonight? Her skin’s uncomfortably tight, the core of her body overheated while chilly goosebumps pucker her arms and legs under her skimpy excuse for a blanket. She’s...itchy all over, cobweb hands skittering across her shoulders, the backs of her knees, prying, searching, and her fingers flex, desperate to claw out of herself, to escape. _I don’t like it! It isn’t fair!_ But those are a little girl’s phases. She’s not a child anymore, so instead of crying out, Rey shifts on her cardboard scrap that serves for a mattress, irritable and anxious, taking refuge in anger. Anger is safe, and yes, willing herself into unconsciousness while in such close proximity to two men—either of whom could overpower and hurt her if she lets her guard down for even a moment—is tantamount to suicide.

Of course she can’t sleep.

Finn snores on, rolling onto his side. Closer.

Rey breathes. Nothing awful has happened during the last several days while she was truly helpless, she reminds herself. Finn’s looked after her injuries, and Ren hasn’t harmed her again.

He’d seemed truly taken aback when she’d charged him with wanting to kill her. His is one of those overly expressive faces and he must hate it as much as she hates hers; it’s so difficult to keep secrets when there’s someone nearby to read her every thought. While she doesn’t trust him as far as she can throw him—and that’s such a meager distance with her strapped shoulder and his colossal build that it’s laughable to use for measuring purposes—she doesn’t think he was lying to her.

Maybe he doesn’t think he wanted to kill her.

But Rey’s too experienced in ways of tricking her brain into believing more bearable truths that she doesn’t believe him, even if he believes himself.

She crunches herself further against the dugout’s wall, curling so that her forehead rests on her knees and most of her body is beneath the least holey part of her blanket. It’s awkward and cramped, but now Finn’s sleeping bag isn’t brushing against her spine with every rustling snore, so she can breathe a bit better. And she has to sleep. Her judgment will lapse if she’s tired, her acuity dulled. She can’t afford that.

Rey imagines an ocean. She draws a breath while tides break over her ankles, sand swirling between her toes. Water surging back from the shore tugs her along with it, exhaling, and she wades out until she’s submerged to to her knees, her hips. Deeper. Her feet leave the bottom. She floats, soft and buoyant and warm. Light. Water shining all around her. Spread out like a star.

She sleeps.

She wakes struggling against a riptide, gasping for air, crying out in a harsh, choked voice—

It’s not her voice. A man’s. Rey’s eyes snap open. She’s here in the dugout, and she’s not drowning.

But he is.

Beside her, Finn sleeps with his mouth wide, snores rumbling and regular. If he’s dreaming of horrors, they haven’t marked his face.

“ _Ren!_ ” Rey hisses—or would, if his surname had any sibilants.

“ _NO!_ ” he shouts.

Finn lurches, but doesn’t wake. The man could sleep through a tornado siren. But others won’t.

“ _Be quiet!_ ” She pushes off her blanket, sitting up, cold and furious.

The darkness underground is nearly complete, but Ren’s face gleams like a pale sickle moon. He’s twisted half out of his sleeping bag, swathes of curled black hair plastered in scars across his forehead. His eyes glint, blind and maddened.

“Ren, stop _yelling_. Something will hear you!” she spits in a whisper. Predatory ground-dwellers are attracted to vibrations in the earth from the movement of prey or thrashing fists, and they’ve used the last of the antivenom. Plus, the feverish heat he’s radiating will be almost irresistible for cold-blooded snakes. Rey crawls from the dugout, circling Finn’s feet to grab Ren’s ankle and shake him. “Goddamn it, stop moving around! _Shut up!_ ”

His hands find her first. Even caught in a nightmare, he’s absurdly quick. His fingers close around her good arm which she’s extended to smack his ankle, and he hauls her across his body in a single brutal jerk.

“ _Ah!_ ” she groans as her strapped shoulder collides with his stomach, and just before those gigantic hands find her throat, she croaks out, “Ren, you said you didn’t want to kill me—”

The hands squeeze for an agonizing moment on half-faded bruises. Stars burst behind her eyes, panicked neurons firing, but she doesn’t even try to pry out of his grip. She already knows she can’t. Then—“ _Rey_.”

She falls back, breathing hard, air whistling in her chest. She lands on the dugout floor instead of on top of Finn; he’s rolled into her vacated space on the cardboard mat with the easy, selfish theft of deep sleep.

“ _Where_ —” Ren’s hands flex.

“No. You’re...you’re not there anymore.” Wherever _there_ is. But at least he’s quiet, a long, blessedly silent moment. Then his fingers fasten over her wrist again, pulling her against him. She squeaks, nose banging into his clavicle. “Ow!”

“ _I didn’t want to_.” His pulse beats out a frantic thunder beneath her ear. She tries to draw away, but he’s too strong. Skin peels off the scabs covering her wrists’ injuries from the zip-ties under his chafing fingers. He’s shivering. “ _But I did_. _I had to. I am._ ”

“You’re asleep,” Rey reminds him. “And you’re grabbing my arm. It hurts.”

“ _It always hurts. It splits you apart as you do it. But it’s worse if you stop—you think, you remember—_ ”

“You think you’re the only one who remembers?” He’s clutched tight in his nightmare, snarled in an anger and fear that’s too familiar, and he probably can’t even hear her, but she can’t stop the words spilling over her tongue, past teeth clenched so hard her jaw aches, snapping out syllables into the scant half-inch he’s allowed her on her tether. She’s so close she could bite him, sink her teeth through the patched cloth of his jacket and into flesh radiating pyretic heat, tearing him apart from without while he warps and breaks inside his own body.

“This desert, it’ll kill you if you let it into you,” she growls. “The emptiness of it. It’ll consume you until there’s nothing left. First your mind, then your skin, until even your bones are gone. The way the sun scorches your brain until you’re burned black inside. It’ll fill you with its nothingness, and you’ll break apart with your hunger, your thirst. Your loneliness. You’ll hate the sound of your own voice screaming so much that you’ll want to kill yourself to make it stop. But it’s the desert, getting inside you. You have to resist it. You’ve got to be stronger.

“You can force it out, if you try. If you learn how. If you let it take you to the brink, then push back so you know your limits. Learn what it can and can’t make you do. Take what the desert offers on your own terms, the way you want. It can make you mad, or it can help you survive.”

His fingers’ bruising grip loosens a fraction. Maybe he’s listening. Maybe her voice is holding back whatever’s torturing him inside his head, drowning out treacherous whispers, a tenuous line of safety. Unsure, Rey doesn’t move.

“It called me,” she tells him, and words curl over her tongue too fast, too reckless. Confessing. It wasn’t her fault, what happened this time. She knows that. But the words come anyway, threatening to choke her unless she spits them out. Remembering. And guilt. Because it’s always been her fault before, so maybe she’s wrong and she’s as guilty as she feels.

“The openness called me. The emptiness. Promises of nothing. An echo of myself. I was on the road when I heard it, trying to outrun a man in a truck. He had a gun. Sawed off. My bike’s gas gauge was running on fumes. I wasn’t going to make it on the asphalt. Whatever _it_ was. So I spun off the pavement when the desert called me. It promised me that I could disappear, like I’d always wanted. I listened. It almost killed me. But I survived.”

“ _How?_ ”

“I didn’t want to die.” Another confession. “And...my bike was quicker off-road. I outstripped the man until I couldn’t see his truck, and then I killed my ignition. Everything around me was...silent. Perfect, perfect silence. All I had to do was be silent, too. I knew how to be silent. I stripped off my clothes to cover the bike’s chrome paint and laid it on its side. It looked like nothing. A lump on the ground. A rock. _Nothing_. I laid myself down beside it. I let the sun and the earth burn me. It hurt. _Fuck_ , it hurt, but I let it swallow me, until I was nothing, invisible, unmoving.”

Rey swallows, the roof of her mouth parched with memory, the searing heat and fear. Ren shifts.

“The man passed within ten yards of me. He didn’t see me. He was looking for the wrong thing. He was looking for me running. He was looking for fear. I wasn’t afraid, there on the ground. I let the desert have me, and it hid me from him.

“He died out here,” she says. “He went looking for something that wasn’t there, something the desert had already taken. His truck ran out of gasoline. I watched him wandering in circles while I lay on the roasting ground, trying to find his way back to the road. Resisting. I watched him go insane with thirst. I watched him while he died. I felt...triumph. Until I knew I was dying, too.

“The desert will give you what you need, but it’ll betray you. It gives, and it takes. You have to learn the balance within yourself, how much you can open yourself to it without madness.”

“ _And then?_ ”

“I didn’t want to die, and I couldn’t walk. So I crawled. I fell, and when I landed, I was here, in the riverbed. I was desperate. I clawed at the ground. And I found mud. I survived...” her voice breaks off, and she lets the silence settle.

Rey can’t remember the last time she’s spoken so much. She’s exhausted, her chest heaving against his like she’s been running, been crawling, falling, digging. So tired.

“ _Why was he hunting you? The man?_ ”

“Because I wouldn’t die.”

_—_

Kylo wakes all at once, as though someone has doused him in ice water or held a brand against his chest. But as suddenly as he wakes, as he’s taught himself to wake so that he’s never caught off his guard, he’s still disoriented, his body processing signals that reach his brain and cause only a static fry. He’s used to waking alone, the peculiar loneliness of waking when others are still sleeping around him, the loneliness of consciousness among the unconscious, those moments when he bears the responsibility for whatever happens next, the burden of it so crushing that his stomach hollows. He’s not used to waking...not alone. His mind doesn't know how to process this anomaly.

But his body does.

His hands are locked around a slender, knobby, scabbed wrist, holding it pressed against his chest _—_ the fingers are icy, but they sear. The brand. _Rey_. Her eyes are closed, and she’s frowning with cold and discomfort in her sleep. The rest of her body is held away from him, the arm he holds stretched out at an awkward angle to avoid all unnecessary contact with him and his heat-radiating sleeping bag. Which is well and good, because he’s hard.

What the _fuck?_

Starved for touch and with no prospect of it, it’s been a long time since his body reacted against him this way. It’s shameful, this response that he can’t control, just like everything else is spiraling out of control, and she’s at the center of it all, the stillness in the center of a vortex: Rey. He could hate her for it, this girl who crashed against him without warning, marking his body with broken teeth and broken skin, marking the steel he’s forged in his mind _—_ always ready for inspection _—_ with sudden, searing thoughts that...that...

He shifts, aching against his constricting waistband, burning inside his thermal sleeve.

Scavenger. Survivor. Enemy. Halfway ally? Conundrum. She’s so damn beautiful. Plain brown hair falling over her face, coming down from those weird buns, sticking to her forehead and cheeks with grease _—_ how long since any of them last had a shower? _—_ freckles scattered across her nose and looking dark against sleep-pale skin in the dugout’s half-light. Her eyelashes _—_ crusted with sand, the long, fine hairs sticking together into a dozen little triangles along the curve of her eyelids. That mouth. He’s tried not to think about her mouth. Her lips are peeling with dryness and sunburn, pressed together in a frown. But he’s seen her laugh with Finn, and he’d like to taste her laughter.

_No. Fuck._

He folds his own lips inward, biting down on a groan between his teeth as his cock convulses, throbbing with urgency. No. He can’t. It’s weakness, with the watcher in the corner of his mind frowning in disappointment for his lapses, his base needs that override his training and his control. Outside his head, Finn’s sleeping the sleep of the righteous and the dead, but Rey’s sure to wake any second under his stare, a startled, feral animal alert to the finest shifts in temperature and pressure. Hazel eyes snapping open, defiant and lovely, boring into his own while his spend spills over his fist and his body arches, mouth softening with a little of _oh_ of surprise as she realizes _—_

Again _—Fuck!_

This...need...isn’t going to go away on its own. That’s for damn sure. No matter how much he hates it and himself. Not with her so close, and his mind torturing him with thoughts of— _that mouth_ —muscles around his spine clench, urging him toward her, or his own fist. It’ll be more humiliating if he has to leave his sleeping bag in daylight with a pulsing, unsatisfied erection than if he takes care of his guilt in darkness and solitude.

Well, almost solitude.

He peels the fingers of his right hand off Rey’s wrist faster than he should if he’s being as cautious and clear-headed as he’s telling himself that he is—just fulfilling a bodily need to avert later consequences. Nothing more. He continues to hold her with his left, shuffling his right shoulder up to slide his hand down into the sleeping bag. Awkward, but effective; she hardly stirs at the change, just curls her fingers slightly so that her nails scrape against his jacket. He feels her sharpness on his skin beneath the cloth. A moan rises into his throat. His waistband strains with the peaked flesh beneath it.

This is an objectively terrible idea. No matter his rationale, it’s violation of himself and of her. But _—fuck_ , _Rey_.

Kylo flicks open his button, eases down his zipper with agonizing slowness. Rey shifts at the metallic sound, fingers clutching tighter against him, grabbing onto his jacket. A fist. So strong, and so small.

Goddamnit, he doesn’t want to spend himself thinking of her like some horny teenager in a locker room, hunched over in shame and pleasure. He doesn’t want to think about her fierce nails and her pretty mouth while he runs his fingers along the sensitive underside of his cock, closing his fist over the taut, leaking head, but she’s so close, she’s touching him, his zipper’s finally undone, he’s pulsing hard and hot in his hand, hips bucking at the contact he’s denied himself for months now, and _fuckfuckfuck._

Muscles in his abdomen constrict, his release bearing down on him so quickly that he’s losing control, losing coordination, gripping his cock too hard, agony and pleasure mingling, heat building in his groin, roaring up through his fingers, gripping Rey’s wrist _—_

Lips part, that little gasp _—_ but it’s not surprise; it’s pain _._

And he doesn’t want to spend himself while her eyes flare open and fasten on him, doesn’t want that breathy sound from her lovely, lovely mouth to be Rey hurting, but he’s rising too fast, already cresting his peak, cock shuddering, seeping between his clutching fingers, his face screwed up in guilt and indulgence, twisting so that it looks like agony _—_

“Ren, wake up,” she whispers.

His name on her lips—it’s too much. He moans, another surge of pleasure catching him up even as his undershirt’s slick and and wet with his spend. Kylo drops Rey’s wrist like it burns him and burrows his crimson face into the sleeping bag’s overheated microfiber and fleece lining. _Oh, fuck_.

What a damn stupid thing to do, getting himself off like this _—_

“Just a nightmare,” Rey says, and he can’t believe his scarlet-tipped ears. From the sound of it, she’s sitting up, leaning back against the dugout’s rear wall with her legs bent to her chest and her chin on her knees in that way of sitting and watching that she has. “It’s okay.”

She...doesn’t know. Or if she does know why he’s sweating and flushed and unable to meet her frank hazel eyes, Rey’s a better actress than he’s given her credit for being.

“A nightmare,” he mutters, clearing his throat, willing the hot color in his ears to subside, his face still planted in his sleeve’s fleece. Head in the sand.

“Was it the same one?”

“What?” Now it’s Kylo who’s confused, because Rey doesn’t seem to be surprised by his heaving chest or flushed face. Symptoms of arousal. Or fear. She hadn’t been next to him when he’d fallen asleep, so how...and why...She thinks he’s responding to a dream, like the nightmares he denies having. A fucking _dream_. She’s not wrong, but he’s sure as hell not going to tell her that. Not when it was her soft, sleeping mouth, holding her wrist with her hand on his chest that plunged him into it, drowning him with wanting _—_

Her wrist. She’s curled her good arm around her tucked-up knees. It should be too dark in the dugout at dawn to see much, but the bruises standing out on her wrist are clear as ink splotches on calligraphy paper. Marking her, marring her. New bruises.

He’s done this to her.

Hurt her.

Again.

 _A nightmare_ , she’d said, but that doesn’t make it any better. He’s bruised her without meaning to. Without even being _conscious_. He knows his nightmares. He knows their violence, and their anger. He knows their guilt.

Now Rey does, too.

This shame is worse even than when she’d spoken to him softly, offering comfort for imagined pain while he pleasured and spent himself to thoughts of her lips curled around his cock. _That_ was a weakness of his body. He’s exorcised it; it won’t happen again. It can’t. It’s damn unbelievable luck that he’s hidden his actions at all. But she’s seen a far more intimate weakness from him if she’s witnessed him in a nightmare. Something he can’t exorcise, can’t control.

“Ren?” she’s asking him, frowning at his turbulent silence.

The heat flushing through him at his name in her mouth is purely humiliation, now. Humiliation, and anger at her for daring to witness something so private when he couldn’t stop her or himself.

“Yes,” he mutters, keeping his voice low with a monumental effort, being careful not to wake blissfully snoring Finn, when what he really wants to do is yell and break something, because Rey’s seen him crying and thrashing like a terrified child, and he _can’t stand it_.

“It’s over,” she tells him, her voice lower even than his.

He glares at her, daring her to use one more word on him, eyes boring against her bowed head with an intensity not unlike that he’d levered upon her just minutes before. He could kill her for what she’s seen, and it’s tempting. It’s getting more tempting by the second, actually, as endorphins from his release fade from his bloodstream, leaving him with only shame and rage, none of the pleasure that he’d yoked to his humiliation. But then, through the haze of his anger, he notices that she’s rocking very slightly where she sits.

Rey doesn’t rock. Rey doesn’t fidget. She doesn’t waste her energy that way. If nothing else _—_ and there’s clearly a fucking _encyclopedia_ of things he doesn’t know about this girl _—_ Kylo knows this about Rey from Nowhere.

“What’s…” he starts. She flinches, her head cracking back against the dugout’s wall. “What’s wrong?” Because he’s an idiot, he reaches out his clean hand to prove to her and to himself that he can be near her without injuring her. That he can bear the contact without hardening like some hormonal kid. His fingers brush just above the top of her boot, barely touching the naked skin on her calf.

Rey kicks him. Hard. So fast and so unexpected that his grunt becomes a yelp, embarrassingly high-pitched. She stares at him clutching his shoulder where her boot’s heel made contact, her eyes dilated. Fear. Instinctive, primal. For an instant, he’s surprised that the words hissing past her lips are even human. “Don’t touch me, Ren. Don’t you ever _—_ ”

“ _Mwah?_ ” Finn jerks upright in mid-snore, Rey’s distress waking him better than any of Kylo’s commands ever had. Bastard, rousing himself to protect her. “What’s _—_ ”

“Nothing,” Rey and Kylo snap at the same time.

Rey glares at him. She shoves both Kylo and Finn aside and scuttles out into the riverbed on her knees and one hand, wobbling but unstoppable. Only when she’s safely beyond Kylo’s reach and half-risen into a crouch, the better to run, do her eyes flit back into the dugout’s shadows. “Finn, can you help me with something, after the scouting run?”

Though obviously confused and slower to wake, now that whatever danger was playing out beside his unconscious body has died down, Finn nods. “Sure. What do you need?”

Her glare skewers Kylo. “Later,” she says.

She doesn’t want him to know what she’s asking Finn to do. Like _hell_ they’re going to keep secrets from him.

But...he’s covered in his spend. He’s going to have to leave them alone at some point to clean himself up. _Great work today, idiot_ , he thinks to himself. It’s hardly even daybreak. _Really_ sharp.

This day is going to be fucking _fantastic_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're enjoying Sun, Sand, and Stone, tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Our girl makes some questionable choices.

To Rey’s surprise, Ren takes the day’s first scouting run, leaving her alone in the dugout with Finn to work on painstakingly producing the next round of their drinking water. It’s good, but...confusing. And she doesn’t like confusing. Out here, confusing means dangerous.

“You okay?” Finn asks her when she raises the tarp for a fifth time in as many minutes to peer from under it, seeking anything out of place in the sliver of deserted landscape she can spy without sticking out her head. A shadow askew, a silence that’s too quiet... _something_. There’s nothing.

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“I mean...during last night.” He packs a handful of mud into Rey’s soiled wraps and twists the fabric tight like she’s taught him, ready to squeeze precious droplets into a canteen. Absorbed in his repetitive, mundane task, he doesn’t look at her.

Rey silently thanks him, even while she lies to him. “I’m fine. Just sore on my shoulder. I couldn’t get comfortable.”

“Okay,” he says, but he’s not any better at lying than she is, even with his head bowed over the canteen so that neither mouth nor eyes can give him away. _Let’s pretend that’s true_.

“I was thinking...you have some medic training, right? Could you unstrap my shoulder today? I don’t want it to lock up.”

Finn sets aside his muddy bundle and props his elbows on his crossed knees. “Sure, sunshine. Now what do you actually want to know?”

Taken aback _—_ his tone hasn’t shifted at all between his agreement and his question, and she’s caught off-guard _—_ Rey hedges, “When should I be back to full strength and mobility with my arm?”

“And your thumbs,” he reminds her.

Rey grimaces. “They feel okay.”

Finn doesn’t respond to that; the swelling around her sockets has reduced, but she’s nowhere near back to having normal opposable thumbs, and they both know it. “So,” he says.

“So,” she repeats back, giving no quarter.

To her surprise, Finn copies her nervous tic in lifting the tarp and scanning the visible hazy horizon. Then, in a low voice, a voice for sharing both facts and secrets: “You want to know how soon you’ll be able to fight. How soon you’ll be able to survive by yourself again.”

“I just don’t want to be incapacitated out here! I don’t like not being able to _—_ ”

“You’re thinking of running.”

“No, I’m not. It’d be stupid to go while the sun’s up _—_ ”

Finn raises an eyebrow. _Gotcha_.

Rey curses to herself.

Again, to her intense surprise, he says, “Okay. I’ll unstrap your arm. You’ll need to rotate the shoulder joint. It’s gonna hurt.”

“But…”

“This is what you want, right?”

“Yeah, but _—_ ”

“So long as you take me, too.”

“ _What?_ ”

“Look.” Finn reaches for the dirty water cloth, toying with its frayed edges. “I know I can’t make it out here on my own. But I’m not stupid enough to think that any group is better than no group. Kylo Ren won’t hesitate to abandon or kill off anyone who isn’t useful to him anymore. And that’s gonna happen, believe me. I’ve been around this guy long enough to know when some shit’s up, and boy am I getting the signs. He’s pissed about something, and when he’s pissed, people get hurt. So the way I see it, it’s like this: I stay here, where there’s water and Kylo Ren, and wait for the bomb to go off, or I go with you. You can survive. And I’m useful to you.” He jerks his chin toward Rey’s strapped shoulder. “For now, at least.”

She looks at him. She says quietly, “I can’t.”

“Why not?” He doesn’t seem hurt, or angry. Just resigned. Finn clears his throat to signal to her that he’s going to move. He leans forward to pluck at the knot over her shoulder, starting to unwrap the bandages.

Rey grimaces at an ache that spreads through her exposed flesh, nerves lighting again after their numbness under the tight wrappings. “I’m not good with people.”

“You don’t have to talk to me.” He reaches around her to loosen the bandages strapping her arm to her ribcage. He waits for her to breathe again before he begins unwinding them.

“No, I mean…” Rey forces herself to exhale. He’s too far into her vulnerable space, but he’s not hurting her. She’s okay. “I’m not good _for_ people. People with me tend to...not be, pretty fast.”

“Why’s that? You’re a charmer, sunshine.”

She can’t help snorting a tiny burst of laughter. But he needs to understand, so she stops herself quickly. “The last time I was...with other people, they didn’t make it.”

“You mean, they died?” Finn rolls the bandages into a neat ball. He’s frowning at his task, but not nearly as much as he should be.

“Yes. Because of me. I tried to help, and all I ended up doing was getting them killed!”

“When?”

“ _Before_.”

He digests that while he motions for Rey to extend and lift her arm. The muscles protest, and the joints in her shoulder ache, but her range of motion is decent. “I’m going to touch your wrist and your elbow, okay?”

She nods, a little stiff.

One of Finn’s hands cups her right elbow while the other circles her tender wrist, anchoring her arm and pulling gently up and back. Firm, yet light. It hurts, but she knows she needs this, so she permits him to work at the rigidity in her muscles.

“Let me know if I’m hurting you.”

“You’re not.”

“I am, though.” He shakes his head at her.

Rey grits her teeth as tension sings up and down her back, pings of pain scampering across her ribcage. “Okay, maybe.”

He nods. “All right. See? If you let me read you, you won’t have to talk. I’ll just...do what you need me to do. It could be okay.”

“You aren’t listening to me!”

He stops his work on her shoulder immediately, withdrawing his hands. Rey’s arm droops. Tonelessly, he says, “You’re right. Sorry. If you’re here tomorrow, we’ll go through the same exercise. If not, you can probably manage it with your left arm, as long as you’re careful not to overextend.” Finn empties the mud wraps and digs another handful from under a nearby rock.

If only she could make a well...but water dries too quickly from the mud to stay liquid for long when exposed to the arid desert atmosphere, even at the bottom of a hole in the riverbed. So they have to scoop through the mud every time...and he’s doing the work when she can’t. He’s keeping her alive.

“It’s not that...that I’m not...I’m grateful, Finn. But you’re better off here, even with Ren. People die around me.”

“People die everywhere,” he says.

The fact sits between them, heavier and more oppressive than morning air already heating beneath the tarp. Rey can’t deny it. But a selfish part of herself doesn’t want to be feel responsible for this man’s death. What if there’s only enough food for one person, and sharing what little they find will mean that they both starve, when one person alone could’ve subsisted just long enough on the catch to find the next meal?

What would she do, if the choice came down to mutual starvation or her own survival?

She knows. She’s a scavenger, a parasite. It’s not a nice thing to know about herself, that she’d leave another person to die for her own survival. But that’s what she’d do. That’s what she’s always done.

And even if there’s somehow enough food, what if they can’t find another water source? Here at least, Finn won’t die of thirst. There’s enough water for more than two people in the riverbed, so Ren won’t have that excuse to kill him.

“Are you going to tell him?” Her voice is small, watching Finn work with the wraps, slaving for the next drops of water.

A trace of a smile flickers across his mouth. “Not while there’s a chance I can still go with you.”

Rey doesn’t tell him _no_ again. He doesn’t ask her why she’s readying herself to run, and she doesn’t explain herself when he seems content enough with what he believes. Despite his impressive size and strength to ward off enemies and thieves, anyone is safer well away from Kylo Ren. Rey lets Finn believe that she thinks this way, too.

It’s easier.

Ren returns too soon from his scouting run. The quiet beneath the tarp has an almost peaceful quality with Finn; for all his questions, he’s undemanding company. As soon as Ren ducks under the canvas, Rey’s skin ignores the heat and pimples with gooseflesh. He takes up too much space under the tarp and in the dugout with his long legs and his arms with their massive hands. He takes up too much space in her head. The scent of him, too much and too close. Sweat. Engine oil. Hot blowing wind. She can taste it.

He’s removed his jacket under the sun, and his shirt clings to his back. Rey can see the edge of the bruise she kicked onto his shoulder rising along his clavicle. Instinct, pure and simple.

He’d touched her, and she’d beaten him back.

It’s her body’s automatic response to danger. A prone, terrified man. A threat to her survival.

She doesn’t understand it. She doesn’t want to.

“How’s your shoulder?” he asks her, reminding her of her kick, her response, and Rey scowls at him.

She elbows past him, further down the riverbed until she’s a safe distance away, picking up her staff as she goes. Ren doesn’t forestall her from taking the weapon; her staff needs space to swing with any force. In these cramped conditions beneath the tarp, it’s virtually useless.

Let him think that.

He’d thought she was helpless while pinned against him when she split his chin and broke his teeth, and look where that’s gotten him. Rey’s grin is savage with angry satisfaction and painful twinges as she hefts her staff, feeling her muscles protest.

Good. This is better.

Through the day’s remaining length, she works at her right shoulder, stiffness leaching from the joint, soreness taking its place while she raises and jabs with her staff in the confined space. _Good_ , she repeats to herself. She doesn’t want to be comfortable. She keeps her back turned against Ren and Finn, who exchange terse sentences about the terrain while they squeeze water from mud, discussing the lack of pursuit from their former companions, or how much fuel they’ve burned on the quads. How much is left.

“One hundred and fifty miles in the tanks,” Ren is saying, “assuming the engines don’t overheat. Then, filling up from the canister.”

One hundred and fifty miles isn’t very far in the desert, but maybe it’s far enough. She’ll be walking the first distance, anyhow.

When the sun finally falls behind the distant western mountains and she can move above ground without attracting attention or heatstroke, Rey wiggles from beneath the tarp. The temperature descends rapidly while she works through her exercises with the staff’s full range of motion, numbing her hands so that she’s clumsy, off her balance. If Ren’s watching her, she won’t look like much of a threat. Let him watch. Let him speculate. She twirls, bringing her staff’s head down in a brutal blow, strong enough to break bone. Even with her aching shoulder and her tender thumbs, it feels so good to move.

Rey flows through the patterns she’s taught herself, the defense and the offense. Formed from half-memories of a grainy television in Takodana that was her only schooling, there’s nothing graceful about any of them, but they’ve kept her alive. She’s awkward, ungainly. But she can move through each series of exercises. _Parry, strike. Crouch, rise. Feint left, then right_. A clout to an opponent’s abdomen, like skewering a fish. Launching herself into the air for a high strike, bearing down with her body weight upon the attacker’s solar plexus. _Leap, roll._ She falls heavily, jarring her shoulder. Rey lies still for a moment, splayed on the cooling ground, gathering her breath while pain pummels a heavy drum through her side.

The tarp rustles behind her.

Like she has once before, she’s flipped onto her stomach before the sound even fully registers with her ears, flattening herself, becoming invisible, muscles tensed and ready to attack if she can’t hide. Instinct.

“Where did you learn to do that?” Kylo Ren. A darker shadow against nightfall, he looms above her even while he’s crouched down on his heels, hands held loose and dangling between his knees.

_Too close._

Rey grunts. Rolling onto her good left side, she pushes herself up on her staff until she stands over him, muscles pinging in protest. He rises with her, taking the advantage again. _Goddamn him_.

“Who taught you?”

“No one. No one taught me.”

“You taught yourself? To fight like that?” There’s a hesitation in his voice that’s new to him, and Rey’s not sure what to make of it. Is he...impressed? Or just confused?

Again, she grunts, shrugging. _Yeah, of course_. “Who else was going to teach me?”

“You’re not bad.”

Rey scoffs at the faint praise. _Not bad_ has staved off death for another hour, another day.

“You’d be better with instruction. You’re all instinct, all reaction _—_ ”

“Yeah, well, I learned this on my own, because I didn’t have another choice! I’m still alive without any fancy military instructors. Anyway, who’s going to teach me out here?” She jabs at his chest with her staff. He doesn’t move away from the hit. “You?”

“I could.”

Kylo Ren knows how to fight. He’s good with hand-to-hand combat—good enough to have almost caught her, except that Rey fights dirty. She has to. She could learn a lot from him, learn the techniques behind her blows. She could learn the real exercises that she’s cobbled together from what memories of _that place_ she can bear to retain, and her instincts for what will hurt an attacker. Fighting with him would teach her to fight opponents bigger and stronger than she is. She could learn…

 _No_. She’s leaving tonight. There’s no way in hell she’s staying, just because he’s dangling his knowledge in front of her.

“You couldn’t.” She marches past him and drops back under the tarp.

It’s later than she’s thought; Finn’s already snoring up against the dugout’s wall, a protein bar wrapper crumpled in his hand. She spares an envious gaze for his sleeping bag before shaking out her ratty blanket, grabbing a strip of rattlesnake jerky, then retreating again into the channel. She beds herself down outside the dugout, massaging her cold, throbbing shoulder and chewing her tough strip of meat.

“What’re you doing?” Ren asks her, unrolling his own thermal-reflective sleeve and hesitating at the dugout’s mouth. For the moment, he’s dropped his instructor idea; she’s half-grateful. But—“There’s room for you _—_ ”

“There isn’t. Finn’s in my spot.”

Ren blinks. Then, to Rey’s astonishment, his face warms in the darkness. He scoffs, louder than necessary, proving a point. “For god’s safe, Rey, I’m not going to _—_ ”

She glares at him. “I’m not sleeping next to you again.”

“So shove Finn over.”

Rey decides not to reply to that. She doesn’t want to wake Finn, if there’s a chance he’ll sleep through the night and miss her leaving. Instead, she burrows deeper under her blanket and focuses on chewing her jerky. Her jaws ache with the force of her mastication, her frustration. She ignores Ren muttering to himself while he lays out his sleeping bag and crawls into its microfiber heat. She ignores how cold she is.

She’s doing a damn fine job of ignoring all sorts of things, including sleep, until icy night winds come blowing down the riverbed’s channel. She’d kept them away with her cardboard sheets fitted into the dugout’s entry before, but now she’s exposed on the ground, and the draughts pick apart her blanket to find its holes with maniacal thoroughness. The tarp over her traps the cold, buffeting and confining the wind. It’s freezing.

 _She’s_ freezing. Rey’s teeth knock together behind her clenched jaw, molars grinding into a headache. She shivers _—_ hard, wracking shudders.

If she gets too cold, she won’t be able to warm herself up in time to make her escape. Her joints will be locked in chilled muscles trying and failing to heat themselves with shivering. She’ll be clumsy, and she’ll be helpless if Ren comes after her.

She has two options, neither of them good. Either she stays where she is until she’s certain that Ren’s asleep, risking the fate she’s just run through, or...she crawls into the dugout, putting him off his guard with her seeming surrender. She’ll warm up just enough, close enough that she can tell if he’s really fallen asleep, and then...get out.

 _Damn_ , she thinks, already scrambling into the dugout, into heat radiating from Finn and Ren’s bodies. But because she has principles to enforce, she curls into a fetal ball between them, not touching either of them even though body heat would warm her faster than anything. Her position’s still cold, but bearable. Nothing she hasn’t done on a thousand other nights.

“What’re you resisting?” Ren’s voice is heavy with tiredness near her ear.

Rey hunches her shoulders against it. “I’m fine.”

“No, you’re cold.”

Pointless to deny it. Her teeth are chattering so hard they’re shaking her entire body; she’s thawed enough to shiver properly.

“How’d you survive this before? How did you get warm on your own, with only that blanket?”

“It was better than nothing,” she snaps in a whisper. “And the dugout was small enough that I could fit cardboard sheets into its mouth to keep out the wind. But _somebody_ changed the layout!”

“Looks like your strategy from then isn’t working now.”

Smug bastard. She’d like to smack his smirking face _—_ she can hear a sneer in his voice, even curled away from him _—_ but that would mean touching him. And she won’t. Still, Rey rolls over to glare at him because she can’t let it go, a grudge blooming like a bruise against his mockery.

He’s...unzipped his sleeping bag, the metallic sound silent beneath the wind’s keening and the snapping tarp. An invitation.

“Go to hell,” she tells him succinctly.

Ren’s winged eyebrows lift. “Suit yourself.” He twists onto his other side, away from her, flat against the dugout’s wall. The broad width of his shoulders narrowing down to his hips is visible to her; he hasn’t zipped the bag up again. It flutters, wafting heat toward her.

Nope. No goddamn way.

Rey scrunches small and squeezes her eyes shut against that tantalizing thermal warmth.

It’s a terrible idea. Very, very bad. She won’t give him the satisfaction of caving.

But _shit_ she’s cold. The offer of heat has made her colder than she was out in the riverbed, directly in the wind’s path. If it were Finn offering to share his sleeping bag...she still wouldn’t accept it. Probably. Maybe? Oh hell, tonight she’d be inside that sleeve faster than a hopping jackrabbit. But Finn’s asleep and not offering. And she won’t _—_ she just _won’t_ with Ren.

Large as he is, he’s left a decent space inside the thermal sack by rolling onto his side. It couldn’t hurt to just warm her hands on the fleece lining for a couple of minutes, could it? It’s not like he’ll know. She won’t touch him.

Is this a good idea? No. It’s not the worst thing she could do, but it’s not great. Is she going to do it anyway? Yes.

Rey scoots herself as near to Ren as she can without brushing up against him. She extends her hands, hovering over the sleeping bag’s microfiber-and-fleece interior. He doesn’t move. Slowly, watching his shoulders for a change in his breathing, she sinks her fingertips into the fleece. _So warm_. So warm, and so soft. When Rey shivers this time, it’s with pleasure. Her nails disappear, then her knuckles, burrowing into the heat. Heat from his body. Her breath catches and she almost draws back, scowling. But...this is scavenging, isn’t it? She’s not accepting anything from him, indebting herself; she’s taking what he’s left out in the open, untended. Scavenging body warmth that he’s stupid enough to expose.

The rationale calms her enough that she doesn’t hesitate to thaw her hands, her wrists, curling her forearms into the fleece on the very edge of his sleeping bag. It feels so, so good, and when she’s this close to him, he’s a damn radiator. Rey will take what she can.

Before she’s gone.

Soon.

Yes. Really soon...

She wakes with a start, a scream fluttering through her mouth, on the edge of her lips. Choking on it, she bites back the sound.

She’s still in the dugout, hours after she should’ve gone. Her hands are still buried in Ren’s thermal sleeve, toasty-warm. And Ren himself has rolled over in his sleep, away from the dugout wall so that their faces are inches apart, their hands so close that one fearful twitch of Rey’s index finger would knock against his. He’s still asleep, chest rising and falling with an even cadence that’s difficult to counterfeit _—_ thank god she swallowed her scream. This close to him, closer than she’s been since his interrogation by the pond _—too close—_ she’s struck once more by the strange asymmetry in his face, the dark points of freckles enhancing the dizzying, disorienting effect.

 _Too close_ , she thinks again. But she doesn’t draw back. And something within her, the part that’s still somewhat asleep, the part that’s warm and tired and even a little comfortable, wonders what it would be like to tangle her fingers in the hair falling over his forehead, to drag through it to the nape of his neck. To hold him away from her, but not too far while she puzzles out the mystery of him: Kylo Ren.

What kind of name is that, anyhow?

He’d backhanded her when she’d made a comment on it. Brutal hands, and sometimes gentle. Huge palms, to take and hold and keep. Anything.

But not her. She’d escaped him before.

Why isn’t he angry about that? He’s not a man who controls his temper. She’d know if he were angry with her. Nerves uncoordinated with sudden waking, Rey’s body shifts an involuntary fraction of an inch, and Ren’s sleeping bag’s fleece skims against the healing puncture marks inside her elbow. Little white dots against her sunburned and freckled skin. She’s seen him angry when the rattlesnake struck, but here in the dugout, he just...isn’t. Another puzzle.

Will he be angry when he wakes to find her gone in the morning? Rey squints past the fang marks and down her nose at him, frowning. He’s offered to teach her to fight, but she doesn’t want to be taught. She doesn’t want to depend on anyone else, relying on a knowledge that he could keep from her. It’d be something binding her to him, something cutting away at her freedom with casual strokes of a knife. She won’t let him. Which is why she’s leaving.

Soon. As soon as she’s warm enough...

 _No_.

Rey jerks back. What the hell is she doing? She’d waked yesterday with her wrist clutched in his mammoth hands, shackling her, and she’d broken away, lashed out, because she’d fallen asleep with him touching her. She’d actually slept! And that’s wrong, so wrong, and it terrifies her like his eyes with pupils blown wide in a nightmare, or something else that she won’t name. The way he’d looked at her when he’d reached for the hissing rattlesnake.

And now she’s done it again, creeping close to him in sleep. Sharing.

It has to stop.

She...she can’t let this happen. Hatred is easier.

So Rey hates him. Drawing away from him softly, slowly, she hates him. Hates him while she folds the sleeping bag carefully, carefully back down over him, so he won’t miss her body’s heat when she’s gone. He doesn’t wake while she inches her satchel over her shoulder, while she tucks her blanket into it around her writing stone so that it won’t rub against the stylus and her canteen, folding a pliable cardboard sheet in after with a precious little bottle in which she’s hidden her remaining gasoline reserve and topped off from her purloined military canister. With her injured shoulder, she can’t lug the First Order’s container that she’d stolen during her escape with her, so she’ll have to leave it behind. Ren doesn’t wake while she arches across him to snag her remaining snake jerky. There’s a piece too deep to reach in the larder hole; she can’t get at it without touching him, kneeling on his sleeping bag to shove her arm further into the earth. So she leaves it, too.

Rey crawls from the dugout and picks up her staff from the riverbed.

She hates him, and turns one final time to sear him with her hatred _—_ but it’s Finn’s eyes that she meets.

A question. _Please_.

Hate makes her stomach weak. Makes _her_ weak. Damn it.

Rey purses her lips for quiet, then jerks her chin up the riverbed. Thermal sleeve rolled under his arm, canteen hanging from his belt beside his holstered pistol, backpack dragged over his shoulder, Finn follows her from the dugout, from under the tarp, to the quads hidden further up the river’s channel. When she grabs one of the bikes’ handlebars, he shakes his head at her thumbs, taking the weight himself instead and lifting his quad out of the dell with a muffled groan. Neither of them so much as glances at the remaining quad. They walk side by side through the dark, silent desert, wheeling the bike for a mile, then another, then a third, until they’re far enough away that the engine’s noise won’t wake Ren in the dugout.

“Which way?” Finn asks her, the only words they’ve spoken.

The pond is west. Takodana is west.

“East,” Rey says. She climbs onto the quad behind him, wrapping her arms around his backpack and his waist, staff and tattered satchel slung across her back. One hundred and fifty miles before the gasoline in the tank runs dry.

Finn opens the throttle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're enjoying Sun, Sand, and Stone, tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Our boy gets dragged behind the struggle-bus.

Again, Kylo wakes abruptly. Even as he wakes, he knows she’s gone. Her and Finn. Her scent is all around him, on the ground beside his sleeping bag, in the microfiber and fleece: sweat, dust, water. _Rey_. But she’s gone. If she’s smart, she’s long gone, too far away to track, even if he knew in which direction she’d gone.

And she’s smart.

Kylo’s used to waking alone. But this time he feels hollow, like someone has kicked him in the gut. Or the shoulder. The bruise from her heel has swollen and stiffened. When he runs his fingers across the crescent-moon mark, pain laces down his chest.

Of course she’s gone.

Why would she have stayed?

He’d offered to teach her. Strength, when she was weak. He’d offered her his sleeping bag. Warmth, when she was cold.

And she’s left him here. Gone with Finn. She’ll have taken the food and the water. But his scrambling fingers find his backpack intact at his head, his protein rations accounted for. His canteen is reassuringly heavy. The First Order’s gasoline canister stands mostly full, too. When he fights his way out of his thermal sleeve and into the riverbed, he can see up the channel to where the quads are parked. The _Silencer_ is still there. Finn’s quad is gone.

A scavenger, but not a thief.

Kylo grits his teeth at her stupid moral code, crawling back into the dugout again. An arm thrust into Rey’s larder finds a lone strip of jerky. And that makes him angry, because he doesn’t want her compassion. He considers grinding the meat under his heel, briefly. Rejecting what can only be interpreted as appeasement, a half-assed apology for leaving him behind. Abandoning him when he’d offered her— _no_ , he doesn’t care. But it’s tempting to grind down the jerky anyway. He could let his temper get the better of him—and it would be so easy, because he’s off-the-rails pissed. Yeah, he’s mad, mad at goddamn sneaky, quiet, feisty, stubborn, pretty Rey. _Mad_.

But.

Even though she didn’t slip off with sticky fingers on his protein bars, he’s running low on food by himself. He’s got a gun, so it isn’t like he’s not decently self-sufficient for most things, but there isn’t much to shoot out in the middle of the desert, and echoing reverberations from a gunshot carry further than the rumbling roar of his quad’s engine starting up. Rattlers are so damn fast that he’s just as likely to miss as hit a snake, and missing will only piss it off. Somehow, Rey managed to catch and kill one with just her staff.

Smart girl. Gone girl. His mind supplies plenty of other words for her. _Bitch_ comes to mind. But it doesn’t sit right with him.

In the end, he wraps the jerky up in a discarded protein foil packet and tries to rationally assess his situation, now that Rey’s taunt is stuffed out of sight in his backpack. He ignores his stomach, curling with hunger.

Kylo’s used to waking up alone, to being on his own, to trusting no one but himself. But he’s not used to _being_ alone. His isolation has been in the barracks, in crowds, in a room he’d locked against his parents in their nice suburban house. And he doesn’t know how to survive by himself, not without all the expert military kits for food, water, and shelter. Without training for the situation he finds himself in. Rey’s left him all the things she had to spare, things she’s used to subsist in the desert, to survive it, and maybe she thinks he knows how to do the same. But he doesn’t.

 _Show me what to do, General_. But there’s no simulation for how to survive the end of the world, and the watchful presence in his mind is silent. Despising him for needing help.

The compulsion to break something is almost overpowering, an overwhelming force in his gut demanding that he unleash his frustration—on anything. But he can’t afford to break the precious few things he has left. Everything has gone south so fucking _fast_. It can’t have been much more than two weeks since Phasma first noticed the filched gasoline, since Mitaka mentioned a girl in the desert, and definitely less than a week since Kylo first saw Rey by the First Order’s scummy pond. But the more he replays the past days in his head like an antique record on triple speed, sounds and thoughts and images devolving into a blur and a headache, the faster anger eclipses hunger in filling his chest. He can’t break anything. Not now. _So take stock_ , he tells himself with something approaching what he hopes passes for dispassionate calm.

It doesn’t _—_ he’s never been good at calm _—_ but _._

He has in the dugout and in his pack: one thermal sleeping bag, good for down to minus twenty degrees with a lining that smells like Rey. A dented metal canteen brimming with muddy water eked from Rey’s riverbed. Eight protein bars that he’s made himself ration instead of taking Rey’s jerky, and which should last him a week if he’s careful. A few gallons of gasoline that Rey stole from the First Order. The clothes on his body—high-collared jacket patched and stained with wearing, dirty pants in a camouflage much too dark for the desert, black thermal undershirt, smartwool socks already wearing through with holes from hard usage, and strapped, steel-toed boots with which he’d kicked Phasma while Finn wrestled the bastard Hux for Rey’s antivenom. His quad and his helmet. Matches in an oiled waterproof case. And of course, his heavy, military-issue pistol strapped on his belt.

In these conditions, Rey’s staff would be more useful to him.

It’s the damn stone age out here.

He’s beginning to think that maybe she doesn’t actually have a secret for what’s kept her going despite the odds. This girl, so strong, so alive, so defiant against the desert, against the ending of everything that Kylo has ever known, everything hated but familiar—he was so sure she’d known something that he didn’t. Some tactic, a strategy for bearing the life they’ve been forced into by mushroom clouds and an earth dying of heat and drought. But she’s not a good liar, anymore than he is; if she’s sneaky, it’s with her chapped, clever hands, not with her mind, playing labyrinthine games to hide some knowledge or training that keeps her going, keeps her alive. So maybe there _is_ no secret. She’s just that strong, that desperate to survive, with more conviction moment by moment in her thin, wiry body than he’s known in his entire life.

Kylo Ren’s nothing if not competitive. If she can do this, so can he.

But as he quickly learns, taking up Rey’s life in the dugout isn’t as simple as he’s worked to convince himself it must be. His hands are huge and strong—much larger than hers curled into his sleeping bag’s fleece, and amplified by heavy muscle in his arms and shoulders—but his fingers are cramped with squelching water from mud by the time he’s saved up enough of a reserve to venture into the open desert at sundown, hunting. His pistol feels ungainly in his hand, cold and unfamiliar. Without Finn to share the water-producing burden, his tendons are exhausted and stiff from a day of laboring with the mud. But Rey has managed on her own.

Walking through the cooling air, squinting through shadows drifting down from a clear sky as the temperature glides into its gloaming descent, he realizes now that her stunt with the zip-ties could’ve so easily killed her. Her hands would’ve been too weak to draw water from the mud. She’d risked death by thirst to escape him.

Who is this girl, that death is preferable rather than returning to Takodana?

What _happened_ to her? What gave her the strength and desperation to take off into the desert to escape a man in a truck with a sawed-off shotgun, a man looking to end her life for reasons Kylo can’t fathom? She’s all instinct, all anger and determination, fighting back against something he can’t see, much less understand. Something inside her body, surviving...

A rustle, a slithering over the sand.

He freezes, fingers locking around his pistol as he raises its sleek, chromatic butt. He won’t risk a shot in this half-light, in the desert’s silence, and his safety catch is on, but the pistol’s heavy enough to deal plenty of damage to a triangular skull. Cold-blooded killers, snakes are slower to strike after sundown. _Goddamn_ , it’s a big fucker, coiled into a ball, hissing along the sand toward him—narrowing his eyes, adrenaline spiking, Kylo hurls the pistol like he’d hurl a rock with the full strength of his arm. _Stone age_. Even in the dusk, his aim’s good. His pistol collides with the snake, which...crumbles.

_The hell?_

He approaches, frowning and wary. And...there’s his pistol, smashed through the middle of a disintegrating ball of fibrous tumbleweed. He’d been so determined, so ready to hunt meat, ready to see jerky in every scratching movement over the ground, and all he’s caught is roughage.

But he makes himself think, because it’s a useful exercise: _what would Rey do?_ Tumbleweed’s flammable, and if he keeps its flames inside the dugout, they won’t show to anyone scouting the desert.

He retrieves his pistol and polishes it against his dirty sleeve. He gathers up the prickly tumbleweed remnants and carries them back to the riverbed, where he scoops out a tiny pit in the dugout’s earthen floor. It’s cold without additional body heat in the hole, which is why he needs to build the fire. It has nothing to do with the fact that he’s afraid to sleep in the dark.

Alone.

Because he’s not.

Kylo almost suffocates from smoke inhalation that night, with his fire contained underground and ashy fumes exhaled from the flames trapped under the tarp.

Knowing Rey, she would’ve cut a smoke-hole into the dugout’s roof if she ever lit a fire inside it. He and Finn must’ve disturbed her setup while they enlarged the dugout, he thinks, stamping on cinders and coughing gray mucus, eyes red and tears streaming down his cheeks.

Or she never lit a fire, and just suffered the cold instead.

—

 _“You heard Navy Seals are tough? You ain’t seen nothing. Seals are a bunch of pussies. We’ve got no place for the weak here, and those of you thinking you’re sitting pretty in this briefing, because well,_ I’m not weak _—I’ve got news for you. You’re a bunch of skinny-ass foot-soldiers, and you’re useless. Maybe I can make something out of you. Some of you. Most of you will fail to live up to expectations. Some of you might even die. If you do, you’ll be blessing yourself for getting out of the game before I tell you very personally of my disappointment in your progress. But for those of you with the strong mental attitude and the right genetics, I’ll shape you from weak-willed bitches into something formidable. I will make you the greatest fighting unit this country has ever seen.”_

 _Ben Solo sits with the other recruits on mental benches in a concrete block of a briefing room, windowless, secure, viciously air conditioned, listening to a general with hypertrophic scars bisecting a shaved head yell at them about weakness and strength, failure and potential, responsibility to the chain of command, to Order with a capital_ O _. Standard stuff. He sits with a rigid spine and an expressionless face beneath a military-issue cap pulled low over his forehead, the creases in his uniform so sharp he could cut himself, a posture that’s been drilled into him over the last five years with the United States Marines. It’s the only way he knows how to sit anymore; the time when he used to lounge with slumped shoulders and stretched out legs on a suburban couch, hiding the height and breadth of his body like he was ashamed of it_ — _didn’t know what to do with it_ — _is a memory that he’s scrubbed away._

 _Well, he_ tries _to keep his face expressionless; he’s never had good control over his eyes and mouth, both too expressive, both betraying him. So he sits to attention at least, with every outward appearance of listening to General Snoke like all the other blank-faced recruits that he’s imitating._

 _While he listens, he thinks,_ bullshit.

_No one in this room joined the First Order. The First Order doesn’t exist, the men and women around him don’t exist, and neither does General Snoke. The First Order isn’t a unit that anyone joins. No recruitment posters, no tv ads with heroic music, no stalls at career fairs and county jails. It’s a whisper, a half-fable, a unit where the hardest of the hard are banded together after being kicked out of the Marines or the Seals or elite Air Force squadrons, too unstable and reckless for the United States to handle. Too powerful to release. Maybe it’s sanctioned by the government, a sort of Black Ops field study on the worst personalities, the most unsavory and skilled people in the military lumped together to kill each other or the country’s enemies._

_Either._

_But probably not. These are men and women that other military branches want to make disappear. The First Order’s a better alternative for people deemed “problems in the system” than a bullet in the skull and a shallow grave. The First Order makes them vanish. And General Snoke saves them._

_Ben doesn’t care about the legality. He’s here now, with a unit dead behind him after his tour in Venezuela. General Snoke offered him a way out of a court martial, his verdict already confirmed. Cowardice, for surviving when others were dead. So he’s here, he’s signed the papers, his choice is made, and nothing else matters._

_This intimidation talk that General Snoke is using on the recruits? Doesn’t matter what the man says, what threats he uses. What rewards he offers. For people like the ones around Ben in this cold concrete room, there’s nowhere else to go. So it’s really all bullshit._

_“Questions?” the General is barking out, his mouth lopsided from a bad shaving job or a machete._

_No one has questions, of course. No one’s stupid enough to have questions._

_“My first order of business”—Ben doesn’t even have to stifle a laugh; it’s been a long time since he laughed—“is_ your _first test. Fail it, and you go home, or to your court martial, or your jail cell. Or hell. Whichever you cretins want. I don’t care about a single damn one of you right now, but I will after this afternoon, if you pass. You will have my complete loyalty, and I will have yours.” The General waits for a response, which again no one is stupid enough to give. He continues,_

 _“To succeed in the First Order, you will cut ties to who you were before you entered this base. You will have no loyalty to anyone but the men and women in this room, and firstly to me. I will take what you are now and make you into something better. I will take the sorry-ass names that your genetic donors gave you, and I will give you better ones. In the First Order, you’ll kill your past, or it will kill_ you _. Do you understand?”_

_“Yes, sir!”_

_An hour later, Ben Solo’s kneeling at the front of the room on brutal cement, where he won’t bleed on any carpeting. Hard, indifferent eyes bear down on him, seeking weakness, a sign that he’s easy prey. General Snoke stands behind him, out of his range of vision, but Ben can hear the whistle and swing of a heavy metal baton, held with casual violence._

_“What is your name and rank, soldier?”_

_“Sergeant Ben Solo, sir!”_

_The baton cracks across his shoulders. He crumples forward onto his hands. He drags himself back up, staring straight ahead at the cinderblock wall._

_“Wrong! What is your name and rank, soldier?” Another blow. His chin cracks against the concrete flooring. He spits blood._

_“Sergeant Ben Solo, sir.”_

_“That is not your rank or your name, soldier!”_

_“No, sir.”_

_He’s not the first to kneel at the front of the room. He knows how this will play out. Others have gone through the ordeal already, and they stand in front of him with feet planted and faces impassive, staring over his bruising body like he’s unworthy of their notice. Men and women waiting their turns watch him endure the swinging baton, knowing what’s coming for them, even as they take pleasure in his abasement and his pain. This is a purging of his old self and his old name. The General will strike until he’s satisfied that Ben Solo is gone from the bloody, kneeling body. He just can’t lose consciousness before the end. He bears the third strike on flesh already blackening with contusions._

_He’s strong, but this hurts. So much. He’s not going to last._

_“Tell me your name and rank, soldier!”_

_He’s meant to resist for as long as he can. Status is everything in a place like this_ — _those who weaken under the baton become soldiers; those who shoulder it to some unknown finish line in the General’s mind become officers. So he takes another blow, and another._

 _And then_ —

_“What is your name and rank?”_

_He...he’s shaking so hard his teeth rattle. He can’t bear it anymore. He knows what he has to do. He chokes out, lips slick with blood, “I have no name or rank, sir.”_

_“Wrong!”_

_He can’t get up again when the baton strikes him down._

_“You are an officer of the First Order. Your name is Kylo Ren. You are Officer 3768. What is your name and rank, soldier?”_

_“Officer Kylo Ren, sir!” he rasps against the floor, flecking bloody spittle across the cement._

_The next blow doesn’t come. Hands reach down for him, and others who’ve already endured the purging raise him up. He plants his feet. He stares at the far wall while another weak, useless fuck takes his kneeling, blood-smudged place under General Snoke’s baton._

_Ben Solo is dead. Killed by Kylo Ren’s hand on General Snoke’s orders. He’s grateful—so grateful—to take a new name. A stainless name. A name that saves him and raises him under new orders. The First Order._

_Training begins before daybreak on the next morning. They’re roused from their hard, narrow bunks with the shrill wailing of an alarm. Some of the recruits panic. They’ll be gone by the end of the week. Kylo Ren isn’t one of them. He reaches under his bunk, grabs his boots, shoves his feet into them—he didn’t undress yesterday before falling onto his skinny mattress, his shoulders aching too fiercely to lift his shirt over his head—and stands to attention with fists clenched at his sides. This will be another test: who can handle the pressure? If anyone can’t deal with a loud alarm clock, they’re not cut out for this life. Kylo thinks he might be going deaf, but he’s ready with about five dozen recruits when the General stalks into the barracks._

_“Out!”_

_They file out, a few others desperately falling into the end of the line. Still others are left behind. Though Kylo didn’t bother to learn their new names or faces yesterday, he knows he won’t see them again, even if he had._

_Icy air slaps him across the cheek with a fierce, dry hand when he strides past the cinderblock briefing room and out into a barbed wire-fenced training yard after General Snoke. Calling the hour_ morning _is a generous overstatement; it can’t be closer to dawn than midnight. He’s stiff and aching and exhausted, but when Snoke orders the marching line to_ drop! _, he falls into a plank, muscles clenching in his abdomen, hands splayed against the dirt. His shoulders scream. Push-up after push-up follows. Conditioning—mental and physical. He does what’s asked of him, and tries not to feel._

_Others collapse. He ignores them._

_By the end of the second day, the recruits have been winnowed down from close to one hundred, to under seventy. Kylo Ren doesn’t see them leave. He doesn’t see their bodies. They’re gone._

_In the yard, the third day begins. They’re given small canvas bags with gauze, suture thread, sterile needles, and pain medication._

_“These are your medical kits! Use them carefully.”_

_A gunshot explodes. One of the other men—one whom Kylo Ren is surprised to see on the third day, given that he’d failed the required physical tests on the second, falling from a plank to his knees with a gray, sweating face before the General released them—receives a deep gash to the thigh. Blood pulses from his leg, a bullet shredding the femoral artery. He screams, pressing his hands against the tide, trying to stem the leakage from his flesh._

_General Snoke holsters his pistol. “Soldiers, you are in a line of battle. You are taking heavy fire. You’re isolated from your unit, with no relief coming. There will be casualties. Do you treat this man?”_

_Blood pools around the injured recruit’s leg, faster than the training yard’s hardened soil can drink it._

_“Soldiers, do you treat this man?”_

_“No, sir!” they answer in one voice. Under the simulation’s conditions, this man is going to die. His injury is too extreme. Others wounded less fatally will need the medical kit’s contents. These others will survive to fight again, but only if this one man is left to die. He can’t take up their precious resources._

_So he dies on the ground in the training yard._

_Not a simulated death. Real death._

_Kylo Ren hears one of the remaining recruits vomiting into the toilet that night, sick with what they’ve witnessed, with what they’ve allowed to happen in the name of their drills. He thinks he knows which one, too. The man who’s strong and smart enough to avoid getting cut, but too soft to go the distance. Kylo can see it in his eyes: brown and shining while the exsanguinating soldier dies. Like he wishes he could’ve used the medkit._

_Weak._

_Day four: “Set up a base camp with your unit. The first unit finished decides the punishment for the last.”_

_Kylo is paired with the vomiter, one of the few women recruits, a skinny and clever ginger man, and a teenager with stick-out ears who’s just barely pulling through the requirements. Not the team he’d have picked on his own, but this is another test, so he delivers, barking out orders. There’s no time to hash out who’s team lead, not with other groups already unpacking their simulation kits; though it’s clear that the ginger and the woman aren’t happy, they obey him. For today. Fortunately, the teenager’s good with his hands, rigging and staking a tarp like a damn boy-scout, while the woman marks a perimeter, shoving other groups out of an area with the best vantages and defensive capabilities, followed by the ginger who plants provided explosives at tactical intervals in the training yard. This leaves the vomiter as the team’s medic, setting up a stretcher and mixing IV fluids. Kylo assesses and assembles the ammunition they’ve been given, keeping half his attention on the other groups while his hands work mechanically at tasks he’s done a thousand times in the dark. Extract components, assemble the whole._

_They finish first._

_Amplified by the simulation’s stress, Kylo’s team is running high on aggression and triumph. By the time they’re through with the last-finishing team, they’ve cemented their place at the top of the First Order’s food chain._

_The medic, Finn, spends the night vomiting again._

_Day seventeen: a laser tag-style exercise through barricades in the training yard. The bullets are real._

_Days thirty-four through forty-nine: reduced food and water rations. Kylo’s team takes what they need from other groups to stay strong, stay alive. When the recruit teams realize what’s happening, they try to conceal their rations. Kylo interrogates their weakest members. He gets what he wants. Recruits from other teams end up vanishing, too badly injured to be useful anymore after their confrontations for water and protein bars with Kylo’s group. General Snoke observes, and nods._

_Day sixty-one: forty-seven recruits remain. General Snoke summons Kylo to his offices and begins an additional training regime for advanced psychological interrogation and lie detection._

_Day one hundred and twelve: survival simulations ten kliks away from the barracks. Their packs are all missing key components for the necessary endurance to return to the base. Kylo’s team stalks another group and takes what they want. Of nine teams that leave the barracks for the simulation, eight return._

_Day one hundred and...something: forty recruits. Kylo Ren is still alive. Other groups avoid his team in the hallways and the mess room. The woman in his group, newly named Phasma, respects his strength and his growing interrogation skills under General Snoke’s personal tutelage, but resents him for it, too. The ginger, Hux, just resents him, preferring more brutal questioning methods. He takes Kylo’s additional knowledge from his apprenticeship with the General as a personal insult. The kid, Mitaka, and the medic, Finn, fear him. They’re all still alive._

_Day two hundred._

_Past day three hundred._

_At some point in the three hundreds: another survival simulation where each team is blindfolded and dropped into a desert by helicopter somewhere hundreds of miles from the base and other teams, ordered to find their way back to the barracks within three months._

_“Complete your training, militants of the First Order!”_

_After about two weeks in the desert: an electromagnetic pulse fries Mitaka’s GPS coordinates and screws with the quad bikes’ compasses. The world ends. They remain where they are, in the desert. There’s nowhere to go._

_They’re alone, and they splinter. They can’t escape each other. They hate each other. They remain together to survive. Waiting for a signal from the General. Watching each other. Supplies dwindling. And the silence. The silence is enough to drive them mad._

_Kylo Ren begins to dream again in that silence, and his dreams are nightmares._

_—_

He wakes screaming in the dugout. Horrible dreams, blending day with darkness. Nightmares from the barracks, of General Snoke and spouting femoral arteries. Of a name he’s lost. Of a girl.

_She weakens you. There is no place for the weak here. Kill her, or kill yourself._

In his nightmares, Kylo Ren sometimes kills himself, and sometimes he kills her. A forgotten man screams himself awake.

Sunrises and sunsets pass and leave no mark behind on the landscape. He doesn’t know how long he’s been alone. One day? Nine? Three weeks? His protein bars, rationed bite by bite, are down to three. He doesn’t remember eating the other five. He hasn’t managed to kill anything, but he’s slowly killing himself with his tiny caloric intake. It’s not a dream, this slow death. It could be a month before he’s dead from hunger. Thirst would kill him in a week. He strains water through his disgusting socks and drinks enough to keep himself from going madder than he already is, and to fill his growling, shrinking stomach.

This isn’t a simulation. This isn’t a training exercise. There are no carefully calibrated supply packs with barely enough to keep him alive through the test, if he uses his mental and physical resources exactly right. There’s no way to win against the desert.

If he stays alone in the dugout, he’s going to lose all sense of time. He’s going to go completely, insanely mad, haunted by _her_ and himself. Then he’s going to die.

So Kylo Ren makes a decision.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eager for relief from this slow-burn? Me, too! So I wrote [What We Do in the Firelight](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14369163), a Reylo Week 2018 one-shot of the TLJ Smut Hut scene, if Luke had just minded his own business and gone fishing, or something.
> 
> If you're enjoying Sun, Sand, and Stone, tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "No...he's a pilot." -- Elizabeth Swann
> 
> (Like the new synopsis? Prefer the old one? Let me know! I couldn't decide, so I swapped halfway through.)

The quad’s gas gauge measures empty, but the bike keeps sputtering on for another couple of miles before finally shuddering in exhaustion and rolling to a crunching stop. Silence descends around them. After the engine’s throttling roar, it’s oppressive, the quiet heavier than the heat. Rey’s breathing is too loud in her ears. She tries to keep from panting and licks her cracked, bleeding lips. Salt. She almost spits, but reminds herself to swallow down her body’s moisture again instead.

Her hips are stiff with thirty-six hours of riding at a fuel-conserving 5 mph when she dismounts the quad from behind Finn’s sweat-plastered shoulders. Supporting her tired right arm with its strap, she leans on her staff while she rummages through her satchel for her water bottle, fingers brushing her precious gasoline reserve. She doesn’t withdraw it. She allows herself a tiny sip from her canteen. Then, sagging further against her staff, stretching into her shoulder’s ache, she just...looks. Looks at the landscape. At where they’ve ended up.

They’d found a half-paved road earlier in the morning, their second day since leaving the dugout. The night before, Finn had offered to share his sleeping bag when they’d camped in the open with only the quad for shelter; remembering Ren, Rey had opted for her cardboard and blanket. He’d deferred to her preference for freezing.

He’d deferred to her about road, too.

“Steer clear?” he’d asked.

Rey had dithered, chewing the desiccated inner lining on her cheek. Roads meant other people. Men in trucks. Shotguns. _Maybe_. But asphalt would be easier on the quad’s wheels than desert ground, requiring less effort from the engine to push the bike forward. Riding on the road would stretch their gasoline a little further.

“Take it,” she’d said.

Now, with the quad’s tank dry and hot desolation bearing down on them, Rey has to admit that they’ve made it further than she’d dared hope. But more than one hundred and fifty miles from her dugout, they’re still nowhere. Aside from an empty road stretching away to the murky horizon in either direction, nothing’s changed around them.

“Rey?” Finn’s asking her in a cracked voice, wiping sweat off his forehead, bareheaded against the sun; either he’d forgotten his helmet in the dugout, or he’d left it behind. He takes a swing from his canteen. Valuable droplets of muddy water dribble over his chin. “Now what?”

She doesn’t have a plan. _Escape. Run_. The words had echoed in her head inside the dugout until she’d obeyed them. There’s no plan. Finn has come with her, trusting her to lead them. To know something that he doesn’t. But she’s got no strategy, no plan beyond _escape_. And to escape, she has to keep moving. _Fleeing_.

“We walk,” she tells him, because that’s their only option at this stage. She won’t use her gasoline reserve. Not yet. She’s not desperate enough to relinquish that secret.

“Where?”

“Away.”

Finn dismounts. He pauses a moment to shrug off his sweat-stained jacket and tie it over his head, like Rey’s done with her gauze wraps.

“Okay,” he says to her, and they start walking, wheeling the quad on the road beside them.

It’s not a good idea to stay near the pavement where they’re too visible to anyone coming along the road _—_ if there’s anyone left to drive it _—_ but Rey won’t steer them off into the unmarked desert again until she has to; they’d have to dip into her emergency gas or abandon the quad, and the bike’s one of the most valuable things they have. It’ll help them survive, if only they can get more fuel for it. The best place to take gasoline is on the road. And Finn has a gun.

Rey is used to silence, even an oppressive silence like the one descending around them, but Finn clearly isn’t. He wastes moisture-stealing breath asking her questions about herself _—How’d you end up out here? What did you do before the end? You got a family?—_ which she ignores. But she lets him ask her, because however much it annoys her to hear the questions, it’s better than the quiet. In the quiet, she’d think about what she’s done, and that would make her think about what she feels. Which is...not good. Feelings have no place out here.

Eventually, Finn stops asking her things, and he just...talks.

“The system came for me when I was a kid,” he says. He waits for Rey to respond. She doesn’t. He shrugs at her, like it’s her choice to be sullen. “It took ’em a while to figure it out at school, but eventually someone noticed...so CPS came. Or people like them. Doesn’t matter what they’re calling themselves when you’re seven or eight, and they’re taking you away from the only place you know as home. Doesn’t matter how shitty it is, or how shitty your parents are. They’re what you know, and you don’t want to leave, because you’re scared. Who’s gonna take care of you? At least you knew what to expect from your parents...but when you’re a kid, adults don’t ask you what you want. You don’t have a choice. Did they give you a choice, sunshine?”

Rey glares at the ground. She doesn’t answer him, her eyes scorching against the already overheated asphalt.

Again, Finn shrugs. Maybe she’s reacting just as he thought she would. He gives a solid push to the quad, watching it roll ahead of them. When they catch it up, he continues.

“They took me away, and for a while it was okay. But foster kids get passed around, you know? Especially ones getting into trouble. I mean, we all got into trouble, and people kinda expected that. But I...I fought a lot. So I got passed off to another family, and then another one. Kept getting kicked out of school.”

Rey snorts. School. _Lucky you, you got to go_.

Finn mistakes her snort for disdain. “Hey, it was better than being at home. You know, I wanted to be a doctor?”

“A _doctor_?”

Flashing ivory teeth in a dark, damp face, he grins at her involuntary response _—gotcha_.

“Yeah. Sometimes going to the hospital meant you were gonna get shots, or something else painful, but sometimes the doctor gave you things to make you feel better. Like when I broke my arm _—_ didn’t hurt after the doctor patched it up. Not right away. The woman I was living with took the painkillers, but it was good for a little while. The odds were sorta fifty-fifty with going into the doctor’s office, feeling better or feeling worse. Better odds than some other places. I liked feeling better. So I thought if I got to be a doctor, maybe I’d get to feel better most of the time. And I could help other people feel better.”

 _Too good_ , Rey thinks. “So you patch up people who’ve gotten on Ren’s bad side,” she says.

“And people like you.”

“I’m _on_ his bad side.”

Finn wipes a hand across his mouth, almost like he’s hiding a grin. “No, you aren’t.”

“Then he’s just got a personality problem all the time?” Rey snips back. Her cheeks are flushed with heat. She wishes they weren’t, because Finn could get the wrong idea about why she cares. She just doesn’t want some idiot with a shit list coming after them!

That gets a laugh from him, and then a cough at the desiccated air wheezing into his lungs. “Yeah, pretty much. He’s been almost mellow these past couple of days, though. You should’ve met him before.”

“I did,” Rey reminds him, pointing to her scabbed scalp, the healing mark where she’d cracked her skull against Ren’s jaw.

Finn shrugs. “Well, I guess he didn’t want to kill you, even then. If he did, you’d be dead.”

A pause while they both digest this, pushing the quad along, feet sweating in their boots and making blisters on their ankles and toes. Finn opens his mouth again, and _—_

“Why are you even _with_ people like that?” Rey demands, to distract them both. And because she’s curious, too.

Finn raises his eyebrows so high that his forehead scrunches and perspiration channels down the sides of his face. He indicates Rey and the deserted desert around them. “ _Was_ ,” he corrects her. “And it wasn’t like I joined the First Order by choice.”

Trudging along, Rey waits for him to keep talking _—_ Finn’s a man who will always find something to fill a silence.

“I...well, I did have a choice. I mean, initially. I could go into the army, or try to find a job once I turned eighteen and the system finally let me go. Didn’t have any college, barely even got my GED, and I didn’t have the kind of money to get out of Alabama. People knew I got into fights around town, so no one would hire me, not even for slinging burgers. Joining the army...got me out.”

“But the First Order,” Rey grimaces over the stupid name, “isn’t the army. Right?”

“Damn right!” He laughs. “It’s where people who don’t fit in with other military branches get spat out.”

“I thought you’d have fit in, liking to fight?”

“But not killing. I didn’t like killing. Don’t. I wasn’t a coward, so command couldn’t give me a dishonorable discharge for that, but there’re ways of making life really unpleasant for guys down the chain. Forcing you out. They gave me all the shit jobs around the compound. Sometimes literally.” Finn cracks another smile, but there’s a bitter edge to it. “And eventually...I snapped. I struck a superior officer. Jail cell, court martial. So when General Snoke came onto the base and offered me a way out, along with a couple other guys in lockup, I took it. Didn’t ask too many questions. I made it through training, somehow. Got paired up with Ren and his team. Survived. And...now I’m here.”

Rey frowns at him, because frowning’s easier than figuring out how to deal with all the information he’s dumped on her. “Why’re you telling me this?”

“Because I figured you’d understand.”

She doesn’t have anything to say to that. Finn’s partly right. Not that she’s going to tell him; that’d be revealing too much about herself from _before_. So Rey keeps quiet, and Finn keeps pace.

They walk until it’s too hot to breathe in the direct sun. Then they sink down into the quad’s thin shadow, leaning back against its blistering metal, and wait for the light to move west.

They’re still sitting an hour later, comatose with heat, when Rey hears it _—_ the distant growl of an engine.

“Finn!” She jabs her elbow into his side. How the hell has he managed to fall asleep?

“ _Mwah!_ ” he mutters, jerking upright.

There’s nowhere to conceal the quad; even tipped on its side, it’s too visible in the empty desert. They can at least get down behind it, obscuring their bodies from view. Rey’s shoulder and thumbs protest the death-clutch she has on her staff. Finn unholsters his pistol, the metal gleaming with sweat from his hands.

“It doesn’t sound like the First Order’s quads,” he whispers. His pistol shakes very slightly.

Eyeing the gun warily, Rey agrees with a nod. “Someone else.”

Whoever’s coming is driving too fast for efficient gas mileage. Clouds of dust rise from the asphalt, drifting nearer from spinning wheels. Huddled behind the quad, weapons in hand, they squint into the distance, and _—_

“I...I think that’s a _car_!”

“No way,” Finn says, but not as if he doesn’t believe her. It’s just...impossible. Cars require too much gasoline to keep running—but here in the middle of nowhere, coming down the road like it’s got a full tank and not a care in the world, is this...car.

“Stay down,” Rey reminds him when he half-rises, shuffling onto his feet for a better look.

“We need the gas this sucker’s burning,” he reminds her in turn. At the pace this thing is coming, it’ll blow right past them without stopping. They need the car to stop.

“Okay.”

Moving quickly, they push the quad out into the center of the road and take up positions on its opposing sides to form a little barricade, staff and pistol held before them while dust clouds wheel closer and the engine’s roar makes the pavement shudder under their feet. There’s a recognizable instant when the driver spots them through the haze that his lifted, over-sized wheels are kicking up; the car fishtails on the asphalt, skidding sideways, black-tinted windows flashing, mirroring their tiny roadblock, their stunned faces. And then the engine dies, softly as a nesting bird.

It’s...a stupid-looking vehicle. And it feels like a betrayal of her trusty dirt bike, but Rey _wants_ it.

Which is equally stupid.

 _No, focus_.

The car’s driver-side door cranks open. Its paneling is reinforced with pox-marked steel over a chromatic silver finish, shielding the man stepping out behind it. And then _—_

“This a hold-up, friends?”

Rey blinks at Finn, who blinks back, as nonplussed as she is. She clears her throat, but nothing comes out.

“So who talks first? You talk first? I talk first? How d’you wanna play this?”

_Cocky shit._

“Put up your hands where we can see them. We’re taking your gasoline,” Rey calls. As a threat, it’s pretty mild. They’re on foot, he’s got a car. It would be easy for the driver to hop back inside that reinforced metal shell and gun his engine into reverse.

But he doesn’t.

“You’re gonna be disappointed, sweetheart.”

Rey decides to deal with that insult later, when she and Finn have their gasoline and can leave this idiot behind to limp back to wherever he’s come from at a regular person’s pace.

“Hands!” she reminds him in a loud voice.

“Why should I?” he shouts back. “My vantage point’s better from back here, behind this door. Your friend’s pistol can’t punch through it. And what’s that you’ve got? A stick?”

“It’s a quarterstaff!”

“Really? Huh.” The man continues in a conversational tone, “You know what kinda car this is? It’s a retrofitted Tesla Model X. Not really military-style, but I’ve done some jerry-rigging, and if I press a button on the dash panel like _this_ ” _—_ the car’s hood raises about six inches, and Rey and Finn are suddenly staring down the barrels of two very large mounted guns _—_ “then _this_ happens.”

Finn blinks again. Then, to Rey’s infinite astonishment, he grins. “Okay. Nice. But those are Gatling guns, aren’t they?”

“Your boyfriend’s a smart one, sweetheart!”

“He’s not my boyfriend! Finn, why are you _—_ ” She’s rapidly losing her hold on the situation, and what the _hell_ is going on?

“Gatling guns are forerunners of modern machine guns,” Finn tells her, shaking his head at the muzzles, still grinning. “But they need to be cranked to fire. So unless you’re planning to roll your window up and down to wind them up _—_ ” he yells to the driver.

“Oh man, that’d be great!” the driver shouts back. “But the windows were electric before I made my modifications, so no hand crank and no dice. Nah, the guns’re rigged to the front wheels. Which are spiked, by the way, so you’re as likely to ricochet a bullet as punch through the rubber. Wouldn’t recommend it!”

“So you can’t shoot while the car’s not moving,” Finn says, ignoring the extraneous information. Like they’d risk wasting good rubber! “There’s nothing to crank the guns while you’re idle.”

A laugh drifts up from behind the car’s door _—_ a real laugh, from the belly. “You’ve got me there, man. Your boyfriend really knows his stuff!”

Cursing to herself and at the driver, Rey swallows, determined to reclaim her bearings: this is her hold-up for the idiot’s gasoline! She strides forward. “Come on, Finn. If he can’t shoot, let’s just _—_ ”

The driver rises up from behind his armored door, a heavy rifle with a wooden stock lifted to his shoulder. It looks ancient but functional. Instinctively respecting its threat, both Rey and Finn draw up, exposed on the asphalt, away from their quad. “I already told you, you’re gonna be disappointed. I don’t have any gas for your quad. That’s why you’ve made your little blockade, right? To fuel up? Didn’t you hear me just say this car’s been retrofitted? _It doesn’t use gas_.”

“Then...what’s it running on?” Rey asks him, very carefully. Wary, curious. He doesn’t seem like he’s going to shoot her, but there’s a definite possibility that he will in a minute. There’s precedent for that, on roads like these.

“Solar power.” He jerks his head toward the car’s roof, which is outfitted with a skin of what looks like blue tiles, shifting to violet and back again under the sunlight. “Modified it myself.”

“You’ve got a car with Civil War-era Gatling guns and a solar powered engine,” Finn says flatly.

“Hey, times like these, you use what you can get your hands on, right?” The driver shrugs, shaking back a shock of curling brown hair without releasing his hold on his rifle. Then, he sighs. “Look, I didn’t have to stop for you two. Could’ve just as easily fired up my weapon systems and blazed you straight to hell. That, or gone around you. But you’re the first people I’ve seen in about a thousand miles, and since I’ve got you outmaneuvered and out-gunned, why don’t you just put down your cute little stick and that pistol, and we’ll talk for a minute.”

All things considered, he’s asking pretty nicely, but it’s an order. And he’s right to think he can order them around like this _—_ he’s got them at a clear disadvantage. Keeping her eyes fixed on the driver’s gray, twinkling gaze, Rey half-kneels and puts down her staff on the searing asphalt. Beside her, Finn copies her motions with his pistol. Like her, he doesn’t remove his gaze from the driver, who’s now stepping around the car’s reinforced door with a casual swagger.

“So,” the driver says. He lowers the rifle from his shoulder and raises his eyebrows. “What’ve we got here? No, don’t answer that, it’s a rhetorical question. But it sounds good, you know?”

Finn huffs through his nose. It might be a snicker. Rey scowls at him, then at the driver. Her fingers itch for her staff. The man extends a leisurely boot and swipes both staff and pistol out of reach.

“None of that, sweetheart.”

“Fine,” she snaps.

“Oh, I like her!” he says to Finn. “What’s your name, handsome?”

A moment. And then—“Finn,” Finn says, like he’s laying claim to the word. “I’m Finn.”

“Good to meet you, Finn. And you are?” He swivels his head toward Rey.

She just glares at this grinning, sparkling, handsome man, filled with raging animosity. The last time she’d given out her name _—_

“That’s Rey,” Finn supplies, elbowing her.

“A fighter, not a talker, huh?”

The words burst out. “Not to people who drive like you! Burning through fuel like that when _—_ ”

The man groans. “Don’t insult me, sweetheart. With a car like this, I’m a goddamn _pilot_. And have you not been listening? _Solar power_.” He gestures at the blazing sun, the endless energy supply radiating down around them.

Rey grinds her teeth at his cleverness and his insults. If only she’d been able to get her hands on solar patches like those, maybe she could’ve rigged her bike to run on sunlight. She never would’ve had to scavenge off the First Order’s gasoline. None of this insanity from the past week would’ve happened! She’d still be in her dugout, living her life alone and peacefully.

Her dugout, where Kylo Ren has certainly figured out by this time that she and Finn are gone. And that they’re not coming back.

“So who’re you?” Finn’s asking the driver _—_ sorry, _pilot—_ half-laughing.

“Poe Dameron,” the man says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Real talk for a minute, folks** \--I have a confession: I've _loved_ being able to update Sun, Sand, and Stone twice weekly, but I'm burning myself out with this editing pace. I don't want to lose the joy in working on it, so going forward, this fic will be updating once per week instead. Probably on Sundays? Forgive meeeeeee...or shout at me on Tumblr?
> 
> If you're enjoying Sun, Sand, and Stone, tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Our girl's all about that solo life.

“Where’re you coming from?”

Shadows have lengthened from the quad and Poe Dameron’s rig, stretching east and shivering when a hot breeze whirls across the dusty ground. They’re sitting in the car’s shade, where Poe has popped up one of the rear doors for cover. It rises like half an _x_ from the vehicle; if both doors were open, Rey thinks they’d look like wings. Poe’s still carrying his rifle across his lap, but his grip is casual. Finn and Rey’s meagre weapons lean against the car on Poe’s opposite side, out of reach. He hasn’t killed them yet, or demanded that Rey strip off her clothes _—_ but she’s leery.

Much leerier than Finn, apparently, who’s eagerly exchanging information with the self-styled pilot.

“Came from out east and I’m heading west, hoping to supply up at the next town,” Poe answers him, stretching his legs and swiveling his boots to point in that direction. The butt of his rifle thunks against the road’s asphalt, making Rey almost leap out of her skin where she’s sitting on Finn’s far side, on the very edge of the shade. Neither of the men seems to notice.

“What’s it like back there? I mean, once you’re outta the desert? Our radio comm’s been down since the EMP, and the GPS got fried, so we don’t have a lot of intel on what’s happening.”

Poe shrugs. “It’s mostly gone to all shit. Droughts with rivers drying up, people abandoning their homes. Whole towns taking to the roads. Things were pretty bad by the time radiation clouds blew in across other major cities from the bomb sites. New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, DC...you’d’ve thought there would’ve been some warning system in place. There were already water rations and crop failures. And then, with the radiation, everything still out in the open got contaminated. People tried to get out. But EMPs had knocked out a lotta cars, so people were stranded in irradiated areas. If you weren’t prepared for the end, you were pretty much screwed. But here, even if most of the plants are wiped out now, it’s not so bad.”

“Not bad?” Finn coughs his disbelief, shaking his head. He’s quiet for a moment. Then _—_ “Where’s _here_?”

Poe stands, raising the rifle with him. Rey nearly smacks her head on the car’s spiky tire, ready to run. “Simmer down, sweetheart,” is all he says. He sticks his head through the open door, leaning over glimmering water jugs filling the footwells behind the driver and passenger seats, and punches something into a flickering screen on the dashboard. The colors are distorted from normal greens and blues to white and fuzzy orange, but Rey recognizes that the screen’s displaying a map.

“Hey buddy, what state’re we in?” Poe’s asking the screen.

A series of high-pitched beeps and whirs erupt from the speaker system. It’s no language that Rey’s ever heard, and Finn looks as mystified as she does.

“Irrelevant-borders-no-compute,” Poe says, like he’s deciphering Morse Code. “Well, thanks a lot, then.” He turns back to Rey and Finn. “The EMP did a number on frying BB-8’s nav systems, but he’s still mostly functional, even if the voice system’s down.”

“You named your nav?” Rey asks him, wrinkling her nose at the sentimentality.

“No, sweetheart. I’m pretty sure the map voice already came with a stupid name, like Siri. Or Alexa, or Danny-Boy. Nah, two _B_ s and an _8_ are all that’s left of the license plate. So, BB-8. And it looks like things like state borders aren’t registering anymore. That’s...interesting.”

Rey breathes, relieved. She doesn’t want to know. Information like that was only helpful _before_. Now...remembering is just a nightmare. Knowing how far she’s come from Takodana, and it still never being far enough. Better that she focuses herself here—on this day, this moment. It’s all that matters.

This time.

This threat.

This desert.

The air’s cooling swiftly, making sweat cold on her arms and dripping down her nape from under her bunned hair. She shivers, wrapping her arms around herself, huddling into her body warmth. She’s exposed on the open road, away from the little comforts she’d eked for herself in the dugout.

God _damn_ Kylo Ren! Damn him, with his radiator body and his fleece-lined thermal sleeve. His tangled black hair, his choked nightmare cries. His grasping, enormous hands.

“Even if you can’t check state lines, you heading west all the way?” Finn asks Poe, reaching over his shoulder and yanking at a corner of his sleeping bag poking through his backpack.

Rey glares at him, at his casual questions, his implicit assumption that they’re spending the night with this stranger and his rifle. He raises his eyebrows at her and shrugs. What else are they going to do?

Fair point, but that doesn’t mean she has to like it. She doesn’t have to like this absurdly charming man in a leather jacket she covets _—_ lined in black silk to conserve body heat, with reinforced red patches on the right shoulder so the wearer can haul a bag heavy with vital supplies without wearing through the hide _._ She doesn’t have to like him, or his named car, or his crooked, devilish smile under a twice-broken nose. She balances Finn’s friendliness with a stare that’s cold and blistering by turns. It doesn’t phase Poe Dameron, who grins at her and calls her _sweetheart_ like he knows anything about her.

She _hates_ that. She’d like to whack him across his pretty face with her quarterstaff. But from the way he’s grinning back at the pilot, chest and shoulders angled toward the other man, away from Rey, Finn probably wouldn’t approve. Like all hunted creatures, she’s good at reading body language. She doesn’t like what it’s telling her about these two, and about herself.

She’s not feeling ignored. She’s not!

“Yeah,” Poe’s answering, eyeing Finn’s sleeping bag with admiration for the craftsmanship, maybe also for the curl of muscle in Finn’s shoulders as he slides off his pack, fingers tweaking the zipper. “Thought I’d see if roads’re still open to the Pacific. Then, maybe jerry-rig a boat or something, and see where the currents go.”

“You could do that? A boat?”

“Finn, my man, I can pilot _anything_.”

Rey doesn’t like the way they’re laughing together, the white curves of their teeth making mirror images in the gathering darkness _—_ and anyway, she’s good at fixing and driving things, too! Not that Finn’s ever asked her. Well, she’d have ignored him, keeping her secrets _._ She cuts in, “You’ve seen the ocean before?”

Poe chortles, still laughing with Finn. Winking at him, like this is a joke they share. A joke about her. “She speaks again!”

Irritated, Rey scowls, hunching into her wrinkled gray vest and turning away. “Forget I asked.”

“No. It’s beautiful,” Poe says in a steadier voice. “Most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. All that water. And the islands! Before tidal waves wiped them out, they were...golden beauty marks in the blue, stretching out to the horizon.”

Unexpected poetry from this man. And it rankles her that he knows how to catch her interest. How he’s describing the way she dreams.

“Sounds like you saw them from up above,” Finn prompts him.

“I did. Flew chartered seaplanes out of Key West _before_. I was in the air when the first tidal wave hit, when it wiped out half the eastern seaboard from that underwater earthquake in Portugal.”

“From the cooling plant exploding there?”

“Yeah, from the bomb. Even out at sea on the testing rig, it did a fuck-ton of damage.”

 _Chance_. They’ve all survived this long by chance. So many little circumstances leading them to stay alive when almost everyone else is dead. Nothing but millimeters of difference between living through the end, and ending with it.

The three of them are silent for a while, thinking through their own outlasting of everyone else. And how they’ve come to be together on this road, with their tentative not-killing of each other. A...truce? So fragile, in Rey’s mind. Poe’s still holding his rifle, and her staff’s beyond her reach. It could explode in an instant, this parlay...their tenuous survival ending with a moment of misunderstanding, a clicking trigger.

Or at least, that’s what Rey’s been thinking. Finn’s clearly taken a different line of thought, because the next words out his mouth are:

“You know, we’re not headed anywhere in particular. Just wanted to get away from where we were.”

Oh, this conversation is _not_ taking this turn! But _—_

“Rey’s good at hunting and finding water, if you can’t resupply. I’m a decent medic, and I’ve got some useful stuff in my pack. We don’t have much to take up space, and we wouldn’t slow you down.”

“ _Finn!_ ”

“What? I’m right, and we’re stranded. How far were you planning on walking, sunshine? Until the water and the jerky run out? Then what?”

“I _—_ ” She gnaws at her lip.

There’s a lot in favor of what Finn’s said, and Poe’s looking thoughtful, eyes hooded in the falling dusk. Considering the suggestion. Calculating. With three together, the odds of survival are better than with one. From any logical perspective, it’s not a bad idea. She and Finn would have transportation—that stupid, _beautiful_ car—while Poe would get Finn’s medkit supplies and Rey’s knowledge of living in the desert, her ability to find food and water, rather than keep depleting his half-empty gallon jugs and pre-packaged rations she can see inside the vehicle. They could store a lot of supplies in BB-8, build up reserves. They’d always be ready to run. They could even take on the First Order for control of the pond, with BB-8’s Gatling guns. Finn would always be busy talking with the pilot; he’d leave her alone with his questions.

But for all these considerations, Rey...can’t think about it. Can’t think about heading west, when they’ll eventually end up passing through Nevada. Too close to that other place. Within its grasp. She just _can’t_.

“You don’t have to decide right now,” Poe tells her. “Sleep on it, sweetheart. We’ve all come this far alone. One more night won’t hurt while the brain juices work.”

“Okay,” she concedes, because she doesn’t have a better option at the moment, and because she’s really, really tired. Too tired to think clearly, but not too tired to ignore her gut instincts. Everything about teaming up with Poe Dameron is a good idea for the three of them.

She just hates it, deep in her body.

“You wanna sleep in the car?” Poe asks them after a minute, when it’s clear that Rey’s shut her mouth for good on the topic. “Gets cold out in the open.”

Finn looks longingly at BB-8’s interior, the leather seats only a little worn and cracked with heat and use, so different from the hard ground.

“No,” Rey says.

Accepting her decision, Finn sighs and looks away from all that luxury within reach, the promise of comfort for the first time since...who knows how long. Probably not since before the First Order. Still loyal to her, when he shouldn’t be. “We’re used to sleeping on the ground.”

Poe’s eyebrows make a crooked, skeptical line on his forehead. “Shit, that’s rough. Suit yourself.”

After a wary meal, where they each eat only their own food and privately lust for what the others are swallowing down, Finn and Rey camp just off the road beside BB-8, where the desert soil’s marginally softer than the road’s asphalt. It’s warmer, too, when the clear night sky leaches heat from the tarmac. Leaving their weapons on the car’s far side—not out of reach, but not exactly easy to get to, either—Poe beds down in the driver’s seat, tilting it back to flat. He’s smart enough not to sleep in the backseat, where he could’ve sprawled out in such pleasure that it makes Rey’s joints ache with longing, curled tightly under her blanket, on her little cardboard scrap. He needs to keep a hand by the ignition and a foot near the accelerator.

She’d do the same.

She wouldn’t roll down her window, though. She’d endure smothering, stuffy air in the vehicle’s confined space, rather than risk a breach in her metal barriers. But Poe’s either supremely confident, or supremely careless, because he wastes BB-8’s stored solar power in the dark to roll his window down with a purr. It’s a gritty purr; there must be sand and dust in the mechanisms. But it’s definitely a purr. A little like Poe Dameron’s voice.

Finn turns eagerly at the sound. “Comfy?”

“You could be, too,” comes the pilot’s voice.

Finn laughs. His teeth don’t chatter in his thermal sleeping bag. Rey grits her jaw, wishing they’d shut up.

“Maybe later. I’ve gotta ask now, though, in case I don’t get another chance: how’d you end up with a solar-powered car and Civil War weaponry? That’s just weird, man.”

“Oh, you know…” Poe chuckles, leather seat squeaking as he shifts onto his side toward the window. Towards Finn. “Who was guarding museums when the apocalypse happened? Military supplies in the compounds and gun stores, sure. But museums? Old, battered tech? I just walked right in, took what I needed, and wheeled ’em back out. No one even blinked twice. It was an American history museum, though, so I didn’t take any blankets.”

“You think they’d still have smallpox spores, after all this time?”

“Wasn’t gonna risk it. The car’s thermostat keeps me warm enough. Better hope your bag’s a good one, if you’re gonna insist on sleeping outside.”

“Military-issue,” Finn returns, jerking the zipper for impact.

“No shit?”

“Yeah. This one time, I was out on a training exercise when the temperature got down to minus thirty, and…”

The conversation trails off into tall tales and masculine affirmations of regard that are too loud, too close on Rey’s ears. These two would be slapping shoulders and grabbing each other’s heads if they weren’t separated by the car door. It’s too much laughter for the desert. Beside her, Finn’s grinning up at the chilly star-strewn sky like he hasn’t got a care in the world, listening to Poe relate an escapade with retrofitting BB-8’s nav systems and having to shut down the comm voice when it wouldn’t stop telling him to _make a legal U-turn_ in the middle of goddamn nowhere.

“The voice kept getting higher and higher pitched, getting all pissy with me, and _—_ ”

Finn explodes into laughter again.

Disgruntled and disgusted with the pair of them, with the absurd pleasure they’re snatching out of the dark, Rey rolls over and covers her ears with exaggerated hands.

It seems like hours of trading stories later that Finn finally remembers she’s there with them, too. He clears his throat, a guilty sound. “Uh, we’d better quiet down. I think Rey’s asleep.”

“Oh, yeah, shit. Okay.”

Rey isn’t asleep. How could she sleep with Finn and Poe racketing nearby, the sound of their hilarity carrying almost as far as an engine’s roar in the stillness? But she doesn’t stir at Finn’s supposition, pretending unconsciousness, keeping herself perfectly motionless as she’s learned to be, ignoring how cold she is so she won’t shiver and betray her wakefulness. And eventually, very gradually, Finn’s breathing evens out into a deep snore, and Poe’s seat ceases to creak as he moves around. It seems to take forever. Rey counts to occupy herself while she waits for them to fall away into sleep, but finally she’s secure enough to move.

Clutching her blanket over her shoulders, she squats and folds her cardboard sheet back into her satchel. Carefully, so carefully that liquid doesn’t even slosh against the bottle’s sides, she withdraws her emergency gasoline reserve.

It’s not that she doesn’t know that staying with Finn and Poe could be a good thing. Rationally, she sees this. But Rey’s not one to ignore her gut for her head when her _knowing_ is so strong, not when it’s kept her alive all this time. And she knows, deep in her bones, that she can’t stay with them. She’d never meant to take Finn with her, but she’d been weak enough to accept him when he’d asked her in the dugout.

 _Please_.

She’d meant to go alone.

She needs to be alone, because with Finn and Poe _—_ and even with Ren back in the riverbed _—_ she knows also that she’s begun to rely on them, and they on her. She’d let Finn care for her injuries. Poe’s trusting her to find the food and water they need. And she’d slept beside Ren, for god’s sake! Slept deeply, with her hands curled into his sleeping bag and her cheeks warm with heat from his body. Slept like she was safe.

And she...she can’t let that happen again. She can’t trust anyone but herself.

She has to be alone.

For her own sake.

And theirs.

_The last time I was...with other people, they didn’t make it._

_I tried to help, and all I ended up doing was getting them killed!_

She hadn’t been lying to Finn.

She has to go.

Rey steps lightly to the quad, left in the road’s center and glowering at her like some sentient beast as she approaches, retrieving her staff from leaning against the car as she goes. There’s nothing friendly about this vehicle, not like her beloved and shattered dirt bike, the curve of the handlebars always making it look like the bike was smiling at her. But the quad’s functional _—_ or it will be, in a minute. Working with a mechanic’s intuition, her fingers find the gas cap. She unscrews her reserve bottle. It’s a risk, fueling the quad when she’s still so close to Finn and Poe. The falling gasoline will make a noise hitting the empty tank. But Finn’s snoring like a freight train, so she takes her chances.

Drop by drop, Rey feeds her gasoline into the quad, until the fuel bottle is light in her hands. Empty. She has to hope that it’s enough to power the heavy engine. Her right shoulder aches when she throws her weight against the quad’s handlebars, but her thumbs are strong enough now to hold onto the knobby rubber grips. The wheels turn forward. Slowly, so slowly, she walks away from the sleeping men and the echoes of their laughter, until _—crunch!_

A scorpion. Its narrow body twitches beneath a wheel. She’s steered the quad over a damn scorpion, and crushed it. Its carapace makes a hideous crackle in the stillness. She holds her breath, but _—_

“Sunshine?”

She’s only about ten yards distant from the makeshift camp. Finn’s struggling out of his sleeping bag, squinting at the silhouette her light clothes make against the ebon sky. Did he wake when she poured the gasoline into the tank, and waited to see what she’d do? If she’d run? And now that he’s sure she’s aiming for a stealth escape, he’ll try to stop her _—_

Rey slams the heel of her hand down on the quad’s ignition. The engine turns over with a roar.

“Rey!”

“What the _—_ ” Poe, groggy and confused, probably stiff with cold from leaving his window down to talk with Finn. His fingers are fumbling and uncoordinated with his keys.

_I’m sorry._

She swings a leg over the quad and her boot finds the accelerator by touch, skidding on the unfamiliar peddle. The bike rockets forward, nearly tossing her off with its sudden, stunningly responsive force. The speedometer swivels up with dizzying rapidity: 15 mph, 30 mph, 50 mph _—_

“ _REY!_ ”

She doesn’t stop. She doesn’t look back.

When BB-8’s engine purrs to life behind her on the road, already too far away to catch her with its high beams, she steers the quad off the asphalt, into the open desert. Night swallows her and she lets it consume her shape, just riding, gripping the handlebars too tightly, her face screwed up against the spewing dirt striking her goggles. Not tears.

On and on. She levels out her speed eventually, conserving gas and thudding along around 15 miles per hour.

Only with the sunrise does Rey realize she’s been heading west through the darkness, retracing her path from the dugout, the only route through the desert that she knows. But it’s too late to turn away; Finn’s quad’s gas needle hovers halfway to empty. Her water level’s perilously low in her canteen. She has to keep going. Not letting herself rest, driven on by heat and thirst, Rey rides through the blazing noon. She rides past a beautiful, treacherous sunset, and into the next dawn. This second sunrise sees the gas tank needle in the red, and the engine coughs with every change in her speed over the lumpy ground. She won’t make it the more than one hundred and fifty miles back to the riverbed, but she’ll get close enough.

She hopes.

She’ll have to cut the engine once she gets nearer anyhow, navigating and gauging distance across the desert by sun and shadow. She can’t risk straying off her path and too near the First Order, into hearing range from the pond.

And she can’t let Kylo Ren know she’s coming.

A tumbled rocky outcropping where rattlesnakes come to warm themselves appears—though hardly raised above the desert floor, it’s a navigable point in this stark environment. Giving the rocks a wide berth, Rey turns the quad right, rolls a few feet, and then the engine dies. Fine. She would’ve had to cut if off soon. She’s only a couple miles from the dugout, if she’s judging correctly.

So she walks. When things start to seem familiar, cracked patterns in the soil that she recognizes and can read for a map, a low growth of cactus looking like alien spawn, too prickly to eat even for someone who’s starving, she knows she’s close.

She leaves Finn’s quad within sprinting distance of the riverbed when she finds one of the tributaries’ apexes, where the crackle of the bike’s wheels breaking hard soil won’t alert anyone around the dugout that she’s nearby. Then, Rey steps forward on light, predatory feet, skimming the earth in silence under a blazing sun. It would be better to advance on her stomach, offering no haloed outline against a fierce, unforgiving sky, no target for gunfire, crawling along the heat-shimmering ground...but she knows the ways of rattlers, how deadly-quick they are when warm and hungry. Fingers brushing the scabbed punctures on her arm, the healing marks on her wrists, she keeps to her feet. With a small grimace for her aches, she swings her staff over her shoulder, into her hands.

Rey’s hardly breathing by the time she’s within yards of the dugout. The silence around her is absolute. Not even a tarp stretched across the river’s width rustles in an illusion of cooling wind. There is no tarp. Her eyes skitter along the river’s depression, seeking a hulking metal shape, but Ren’s quad is gone. Less careful now, she hops the channel to peer into the dugout from above. A protein wrapper winks from within the empty hole, flashing its crinkled silver insides around a lone strip of jerky. Rey’s snake jerky.

It’s...abandoned.

He’s gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I'm currently watching Westworld (about which I have ~opinions~ (if you have opinions, too, let's talk!)), and I'm interested in maybe saddling up with a [Wild West AU](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/post/173583264515/reylo-wild-west-au-holding-the-mustang-to-a) after Sun, Sand, and Stone finishes. 
> 
> Is there readership for something like this?? Shout at me if yes, shout at me if no, or shout at me about Westworld! (I will shout back because ~opinions~.)
> 
> If you're enjoying Sun, Sand, and Stone, tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A side-order of cognitive dissonance for our boy, please.

Kylo fills his canteen from the river’s muddy seepings until he can barely screw the cap on without water leaking over the rim. He runs his tongue over the spillage and crowds the bottle into his backpack, already stuffed with his crumpled sleeping bag. He leaves the jerky behind, tossing the dried meat into the dugout with a scornful flick of his wrist. Even when he’s lightheaded with hunger, he hasn’t touched that insulting appeasement, that kick to the gut when he was already down.

Reaching up, he snags the tarp spread across the riverbed and pulls it free from its stakes. He fists it into a bundle and shoves it on top of his sleeping bag. Then he hefts the straps of his pack over his shoulders _—_ the weights inside the double-stitched canvas are far too light, but they’re all he has _—_ grabs the stolen gasoline canister, and strides up the river channel to his quad.

One hundred and fifty miles with the gasoline in the bike’s tank before he needs to refuel. It’s more than enough to get him where he’s going. The only place he can go. Rey _—the girl_ , he reminds himself _—_ hasn’t left any tracks or dust spirals to follow, so she’s driving him back, leaving him with the quad’s tank half-full and the gas jug to hand. She hadn’t siphoned off his reserves or taken the canister, and he sort of hates her for that. It’s her fault that he’s going back. That he can make it back. After all he offered her _—_ her fault.

He checks the clip on his gun: a full round, since he hasn’t managed to shoot anything. He jams the clip home and buckles his pistol into its holster on his belt, finger switching off the safety with an instinctive flick. When he settles onto his bike, gasoline canister swinging from the handlebars, he makes sure that he can reach the pistol’s butt when leaning forward and low over the dash. He can. All he needs is the coordination to do it while gunning his engine at top speed; then, he just has to let his training take over and pull the trigger.

 _Easy_.

Jamming his helmet over his head, Kylo kicks his quad into gear with a vehemence that makes the sturdy vehicle shudder under his weight. The speedometer creeps up until the _Silencer_ ’s wheels are barely making contact with the desert ground and the engine’s screaming in his ears. He doesn’t want to give himself time to think too much about what he’s doing.

Where he’s going.

She’s gotten her way, and he’s failed. He’s not going to Takodana.

He slams the throttle all the way up. Let them know he’s coming. Let them be afraid. He’s Kylo Ren, and they should be fucking _terrified_.

When the pond looms into view, its scummy surface shimmers like a mirage in the early morning’s half-light through his helmet visor: water masquerading as sand masquerading as water. Goddamn mind trip.

Someone _—_ probably boy-scout Mitaka _—_ has pieced together another shelter from a ground tarp, staked right on the edge of the pond, next to a pile of logo-stamped gasoline canisters like the one on Kylo’s handlebars. The First Order’s camp looks just the same. Except this time, the guns in his comrades’ hands are pointed in his direction as he roars up on his quad. The first shot explodes from Phasma’s muzzle and punctures the _Silencer_ ’s left front tire, sending him into a skid. A second tears through his jacket’s sleeve, the sliding quad saving him from the bullet’s piercing straight through his arm. It burns where the lead slug’s passage sears his shoulder.

“ _Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit!_ ” someone’s screaming. Also probably Mitaka.

It gives Kylo a savage satisfaction even as he’s skidding out of control, because if he can’t predict where his quad’s going to end up, neither can the shooters.

And then he’s on them, crashing against the tarp structure, through it, tearing across discarded sleeping bags and backpacks. The canvas blinds him with its flapping corners until he paws his way clear, gun in hand as he shoves the camp’s debris aside.

“Get out of the way!” Phasma’s yelling at Mitaka, trying to aim around him. The kid’s completely lost his head; a black-hat hacker before being drafted into the First Order, this could be his first real firefight away from the training base. He’s running back and forth across the camp between the tarp and the gasoline canisters with weird little jumps and hunched shoulders, like he can’t decide whether to run or attack on a surfeit of adrenaline.

For some inexplicable reason, Kylo finds himself grinning again at the ridiculous display, thinking of Rey and her middle finger in a crisis. It’s just adrenaline in his own bloodstream, but damn, it feels good. He’ll exorcise all thoughts of her later.

He rolls, avoiding a wide shot from Hux _—_ the bastard has always been better at strategy than combat, and loses his shit as spectacularly as Mitaka with a furious twisting to his pasty face at his own ineptitude, at Kylo’s rupture of well-laid plans _—_ and surges onto his feet, free of the loose tarp before ducking for cover behind his overturned quad. It’s smoking with a stomach-churning stench, smearing the dusky dawn air with agitated dust and belching fumes.

Good.

He cups a hand around his mouth, aiming his voice to the left through his helmet, echoes bouncing in an eerie cadance. “Lower your weapons, soldiers!” And he heaves the stolen, rolling gasoline canister after his voice with a thud.

On cue, both Mitaka and Hux swivel and fire into the smoke where Kylo’s thrown his voice and where the canister’s landed on the ground in a facsimile of a moving body. His grin widens while he dives back behind the quad as bullets sing around him, bloodlust sparking in his nervous system, reveling in his body, his strength, stripping away shame and fear.

Smarter than the others, not bothering with obliterating the patch of earth where Hux and Mitaka are still blazing away at nothing, Phasma charges over the quad, tackling Kylo with her full weight. She’s nearly as strong as he is.

“I told you I’d kill you if you ever came back here,” she grunts, pinning one of his arms to the ground with her knees on his bucking chest.

“I’m sorry, but where did you get the impression I was ever listening when you were talking?” He cracks his forehead against hers, helmet ricocheting off unprotected flesh. Phasma grunts, but doesn’t release her hold. He brings up his leg behind her where she straddles his stomach, jabbing his knee with crippling force against her sacrum. She falls sideways, gasping, fingers loosening on her pistol in a spinal reflex. Kylo fastens a grip around her ribcage, using her momentum to propel himself over with her as she collapses, twisting so that he’s pinned her down as she’d tried to pin him.

Upper hand _gained_. He slams a fist down on Phasma’s wrist and she yelps, fingers uncurling from around her pistol. He grabs the weapon and shoves it into his belt. Then his shoulder swings around, hauling the woman up to standing with his forearm held in a choke-hold against her windpipe, his own pistol stuck intimately into her ear.

“I never listen when you talk,” he tells her, panting through his helmet. “Never have, never will. Remember, I’m Kylo _fucking_ Ren, soldier, I’m the damn leader of this team, and _—_ ”

“Drop it, s-sir _—_ Ren.”

Strangely, it’s Mitaka who makes the demand, voice quavering enough to make Kylo smirk again; Hux is inarticulate with fury. The scrawny kid holds his pistol in both shaking hands. Really, that’s the biggest threat right now _—_ spiked on adrenaline, Mitaka’s quivering fingers might squeeze the trigger by accident.

“You bastard,” Phasma tells him, spitting against his hold.

Kylo gives his pistol a twist, digging further into her ear.

“You fucker _—_ ” Hux finally manages in a show of originality.

High on his own adrenaline, Kylo rolls his eyes behind his visor. “This conversation’s only been going on for about a minute, and already it’s boring me.”

“I’m going to have to shoot you if you don’t release the captain,” Mitaka tells him, muzzle swinging wildly. Nervous, halfway apologetic.

“Shut up, Mitaka,” Phasma growls.

“I’ll shoot!” the kids warns, voice cracking.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Phasma says. “You’re going to hit me, you little shit.”

“Then what should I do?”

“Are you going coach him through this, _captain_?” Kylo asks her, emphasizing her self-promotion. “Or should I? No, never mind. As team leader, I’ll do it. It’s my responsibility to educate the assholes, right? Responsibility for the team’s success and survival, as General Snoke would say. Wonder what he’d say if he could see you all now.” Mitaka blanches at the prospect. Kylo follows up with, “Mitaka, if you don’t lower your weapon before you poke your own eye out or shoot someone somewhere important, I’m going to blow Phasma’s head apart. You ever seen what a head looks like when a bullet goes through it?”

“N-no _—_ ”

“Do you want to?”

“No…”

“Then drop your weapon. _Now_.”

“Mitaka, I order you not to _—_ ”

“ _Shut up_ , Hux,” Kylo and Phasma shout together. To emphasize his displeasure, Kylo jams his pistol deeper still into Phasma’s ear. She hisses, eardrum puncturing around the barrel.

“ _Fuck you_ , Ren.” Her voice is too loud; she can’t judge its volume anymore.

“That’s disgusting,” he tells her, close to breaking up with insane laughter. Nothing in this situation is even remotely funny, but he finds it fucking _hilarious_. This, _this_ is what he’s good at. Not playing watchdog for chilly, prickly girls with sticky fingers worming into his sleeping bag _—this_. “Now Mitaka, and you, Hux, I’m going to count to three. If your pistols aren’t on the ground by _three_ , this gun’s going to go off, and it’ll be your fault, like it’s your fault that gasoline’s leaking out of the canister _I_ brought back, and that you’ve shot full of holes. Ready?”

Mitaka looks like he’s about to either pass out or jump from his skin with terror. Hux has his teeth bared beneath thin, bloodless lips. A rabid cur with a gun. Powerful, and impotent. Phasma’s almost as tall and broad across the waist and shoulders as Kylo is, so neither of the other men have a clear shot around her muscular body. Kylo’s helmet protects the exposed crown of his head just above hers, and he’s angled his forearm around her throat so that there’s no point of contact where shooting his arm won’t also pierce through flesh and muscle to strike Phasma’s chest or neck, too.

“ _Thr—_ ”

Pistols fall from Mitaka’s and Hux’s hands and to Kylo’s feet in horror at the lack of any wind-up to the third-act finale, the sudden, swooping shadow of death.

“ _Ee_ ,” Kylo finishes. In one motion borne of a thousand repetitions in muscle memory, he turns Phasma into a headlock under his left shoulder, jerking his pistol free and firing with an outstretched arm to his right, away from her body. Mitaka screams _—_ idiot kid _—_ and another gasoline canister punctures with a satisfying _pop_. In the stunned silence following his shot, fluid drips down... _ping, ping, ping_ on the other metal canisters below it...where the thirsty desert soaks up his offering.

“What the _fuck_ , Ren?” Even bent over and wheezing, head between her legs while she struggles to breathe after he’s released her throat from his elbow’s lock _—_ breathe when she’s certainly expected to be a splatter of gray matter and red ink on the soil _—_ Phasma’s the first to recover enough to speak. As always.

Kylo shoves her away and claims the unmanned pistols on the ground, which he forces into his belt along with the one he’s already confiscated from Phasma.

“Patch up that canister and the other one you and Hux shot,” he says to Mitaka. His own pistol is raised just enough to make it clear that the kid taking on Finn’s old position of medic and janitor isn’t up for debate.

“I-I don’t know how _—_ ” He’s physically shaking, reacting like Kylo’s actually blown Phasma’s head off.

“Did I ask you if you knew how?”

“N-n-no, sir.”

“Damn right. Patch it up, soldier.”

Mitaka half-scrambles, half-shuffles over to the stache of canisters, body displaying symptoms of potent shock in his locked knees, the uncoordinated way his arms swing at his sides.

Reviving fast, Phasma straightens, pissed and probably sore as hell. She pushes back her shoulders and walks right past Kylo’s pistol to jab him in the chest. He knocks her wrist aside before her finger makes contact, raising his eyebrows inside his helmet. “Careful, _captain_ ,” he tells her, voice emerging flat and toneless from behind his visor. She still doesn’t miss the emphasis. She takes a single, short step back and crosses her arms, fingers twitching like they’re itching to protect her bruised throat.

But she says, all aggressive bravado, “What the hell are you doing back here? Where’s your little bitch?”

“Finn? Dead.”

“I literally could not care less about that fucker. I meant the girl.”

“Dead. They were slowing me down, eating into supplies.” Kylo tilts his head toward his pistol. “So.”

“Well, fuck me.” Maybe she’s even a little impressed with his callousness, his cold execution. She conceals it quickly.

But Hux glares at where he thinks Kylo’s eyes are inside his helmet, jealousy splashed across his weasley face anyhow. “I thought you liked her.” It’s such a petulant thing to say. Phasma winces in embarrassment for her unsatisfactory lover.

Kylo scoffs, at Hux’s tone and his inference. “She had something I wanted. Or at least, I thought she did. Turns out, she knows nothing. She’s got nothing. She isn’t any use to me anymore. So I took the gasoline she’d stolen, and _—_ ” Again, he jerks his chin at his pistol.

“That’s...present tense?” Mitaka ventures from where he’s trying to tie a torn-off sleeve from his jacket around one of the gasoline canisters, like he’s planning to make a tourniquet. Goddamn, how is this kid still alive? Half-eagle scout, half-black hat hacker _—_ probably a good little boy until he’d disappointed his family, and everything went to shit when they found out about his inclinations for rule-breaking _—_ and _all_ annoying, he’s the weirdest person Kylo’s ever met.

Well, except for Rey.

But _—_

“Phasma.” Kylo jerks his chin toward the mess Mitaka’s made. An order. And...she goes, shoving Mitaka aside and yanking one of his boots off to peel a patch of rubber from the sole with her knife, whittling and fitting it into the canisters’ leaking bullet holes like plugs.

Present tense, forgotten.

Hux is continuing to watch Kylo like the bastard that he is. It’s a look Kylo doesn’t like, so he removes his helmet to lock eyes with the man, to make this hurt. He takes the ginger’s pistol from his belt and releases the clip; now the gun’s nothing but a lump of steel. He inspects the clip’s contents. Idiot’s used half his inventory firing at nothing. Then he lobs the emptied pistol at Hux’s feet. Tossing scraps to a cur. He does the same with Phasma’s and Mitaka’s weapons, and takes their knives.

They’re submitting to him at the moment, when he’s taken them by surprise, when they haven’t had time to formulate a counterattack to the stupid stunt he’s pulled _—stupid like Rey_ , his mind supplies, and he squashes it with a scowl that makes Mitaka cower _—_ but he’s under no illusions that they won’t try to kill him in his sleep. If he were in their position, he’d do the same.

He’ll have to be more careful than before. Trust has never been part of the equation with his team. Wary, grudging respect, a mutual armistice and setting aside their battles for dominance while they fight against a more potent enemy _—_ the desert will kill them if they let their guard down against it. But while Kylo prefers to take his chances with the First Order over the relentless sun and baking thirst alone, it’s a slim margin of choice.

Sleep won’t be an option for the first few days. Not until he can establish himself again, with fear or cunning. It’s already working with Mitaka, who’s reverted to calling him _sir_. But bringing Phasma and Hux back under control won’t be so easy. They like power, these two. Mutual resentment between the three of them stretches as far back as the First Order itself, when Kylo had taken charge of the team’s base-camp exercise and caught General Snoke’s attention. They’d won the challenge under his leadership and continued to succeed as the trials became more brutal and Kylo’s training regime with the General proved useful, and maybe that’s why they hate him. Success and resentment are too knotted up with each other.

At least Phasma and Hux can fuck out their frustrations on each other.

The idea disgusts him. Maybe it’s better that they’ll come after him with violence, instead. He’s got their gun clips and their blades, but Phasma could choke him with her bare hands if she gets a grip. And Hux is good with poisonous snakes, the slimy fucker.

So he can’t sleep.

Repairing damage to the camp, patching Kylo’s quad’s punctured wheels, and assessing their supplies takes most of the day, since working in the open after what Mitaka’s barely functioning wristwatch claims is 10am is impossible. Even in the shade, their movements are slow. Sluggish. They crawl under the erected tarp and they just...sit, staring at the ground, at their packs. Not good, because sitting means thinking. The heat and several sleepless nights in the dugout coax Kylo to close his eyes, whispering of escape from the desert’s blistering daytime temperatures with unconsciousness _—_ but he can’t. Not with these assholes. He pries up his heavy eyelids, blinking in sections, like shutters.

Phasma sits back.

His lips crack when he grins against his fatigue at her. He drinks from his canteen, long and slow, exposing his throat while he swallows. Showing her that he’s not afraid in the oldest style of primal dominance.

With someone like Rey, she’d probably take the opportunity to shank him. Or jam her elbow against his pulse point in the hollow between his clavicles. Or rake her nails across his skin, drawing blood, her mouth screwed up and those hazel eyes flashing...He forces his mind away from the image, his trousers tightening.

_What the fuck?_

But it’s Phasma here, not the girl, and with a woman like Phasma...well, Hux is scowling harder than normal.

“Where’d you find the water?” Mitaka asks, frowning not at Hux possessively pawing Phasma’s breasts, but at traces of mud rimming Kylo’s lips when he lowers the canteen.

“You think this shitty, scummy pond’s the only water around?”

“W-we all did.” The kid grips his elbows and curls in against the scornful lash in Kylo’s voice, mired in his own sweat.

“It’s not.” Kylo takes another drink and wipes his mouth.

“Obviously,” Phasma says, pushing Hux away. “Where?”

The pitiful strip of leftover jerky flashes across his mind. Waking alone, with the scent of her all around him. Gone. Abandoning the dugout. And him. _Fuck_ her.

“About fifteen miles east. There’s a dry riverbed, and water if you dig for it.”

“Mud,” Hux scoffs.

“Dirt’s a good filtration system,” Mitaka pipes up. “We wouldn’t have to use any more purifier tablets. This is the last pack.” The perforated foil sleeve he extracts from his backpack, leaving moist fingerprints on the glittering material, is only a third full. It’s crumpled where Kylo’s quad spun over it during the morning’s firefight, with the rest of the sleeve crushed to powder from the bike’s wheels. Mitaka wisely doesn’t mention this.

There’re maybe enough tablets left to clean another thirty gallons.

Barely another couple weeks of purified water. Then, it’s swallowing the pond’s full scum for them. If they don’t starve, first.

“How’re our food reserves?”

A measly pile of protein bars, smaller than when he’d left. Nothing caught and killed from the earth; just what General Snoke had given them when dropping the team into the desert for their survival exercise. The rations would’ve probably been barely enough to last them through the simulation. The General would’ve expected the First Order units to come up with other solutions to the problem of hunger, pushing them to be resourceful, and punishing them with starvation if they failed.

So.

“We need to find another food source.”

“Like what?” Hux sneers.

“You’re good with snakes,” Kylo says through his teeth. “Get a rattler. You can make jerky from the meat. Mitaka can use the skin for patching up his boot. Otherwise, something’s going to bite or sting him through the hole, and then he’ll be useless.”

Despite the punishing heat and his sunburn, Mitaka blanches.

It’s so easy with him.

Kylo’s pretty sure the kid could think circles around him in a classroom or a corporate boardroom, where all the violence happens in switching zeroes and ones, but out here, Kylo Ren’s brutal skill set dominates Dopheld Mitaka’s. The boy-scout’s got smarts, and that’s useful so far, but he’s scared of violence. Scared of Kylo.

He should be.

“What am I supposed to use to kill it?” Hux is demanding, still stuck on the snake thing. “I’ll need my gun or knife _—_ ”

“We all want things we’re not going to get.” Kylo shuts that down. “I know you can catch those twisty bastards with your bare hands. If you get bitten, that’s on you for being a clumsy shit.”

Hux chokes in fury. “If you hadn’t used all the antivenom _—_ ”

“You really want to finish that sentence?” Kylo doesn’t have to reach for his loaded pistol to make his point. The threat will be better if he doesn’t; Hux’s imagination of all the ways Kylo can hurt his pasty, unsavory body are probably better than reality. But he finds his fingers curling around the pistol’s butt anyhow, snapping open the holster’s strap, ready to draw. Finn, pummeling Hux over the antivenom while the girl lay still and glassy-eyed, staring past him and up at nothing _—_

And suddenly the gun’s cupped in his hand, muzzle pointed directly between the ginger caterpillars that Hux claims are his eyebrows. The man’s pale blue eyes cross as he struggles to keep the pistol in sight, tracking the muzzle with washed-out irises.

“Ren.” Phasma. A warning.

 _Fuck_.

He’s blown his threat; she knows it, even if Hux is too terrified to realize that. If he’d planned to shoot them all, he’d have done it already. Unholstering on a provocation like Hux’s is a stupid thing to do. It takes the threatening weight out of a drawn gun.

What the hell is _wrong_ with him?

“They’ll be easier to catch after sundown. Slower to strike,” Kylo says, and the stunned shaking in his voice barely registers. His hands had moved without his brain comprehending their intent, instinct contracting muscle and tendon. He’d moved with the same rashness with which he’d snatched up the snake from Rey’s chest and crushed it under his heel. Nothing had passed across his mind in either of these moments. Just a blinding hum, afraid and fearless all at once.

 _Steady_.

“If I hadn’t used the antivenom, I wouldn’t have found out about the other water source.” Justification, for Phasma and himself.

“Then that’s where the little bitch was hiding,” she says.

She’d meant Finn before. She clearly doesn’t, now.

“Yes.” Kylo restricts himself to that one word. He holsters his pistol, motions deliberate under Hux’s narrow, wary gaze, now that the center of the man’s world isn’t the muzzle’s small black opening. Careful. He forces himself to think through every gesture. To own each contraction of tendons in his fingers, the pull of muscle in his shoulder as he lifts the pistol to angle it down, aiming the muzzle into its leather sheath. Control. He can’t lapse again.

He won’t.

 _She_ can’t have that power over him. _She_ ’s gone. Probably dead in the desert. How many days since she left him in the dugout? Dead of thirst, abandoning him and her water source.

So why does he think of her in the present tense?

Goddamn Mitaka and his tricky little grammars, pointing this out.

Evening brings no relief, shadows stealing across the landscape but only darkening the heat rather than cooling the seared ground. Sunset and cold arrive in an instant on most desert nights, but tonight a fierce, hot wind remains, biting at the tarp, drawing sweat back into Kylo’s hair until it drips down his neck. He couldn’t sleep now, even if he wanted to. And he really, really doesn’t want to. Not with Phasma and Hux being too quiet together, shoulder to shoulder in a rare show of asexual camaraderie while they wait until it’s cool enough to leave the tarp in search of dark-slow rattlesnakes. He should keep them separated. But god, he’s tired, and getting them both away from him for a while is the only relief he’s likely to get. If he can just stay awake, they won’t catch him unawares.

“We’ve been keeping a watch,” Mitaka ventures. “On the canisters, at night.”

“Thought I’d come back to steal?”

Mitaka frowns, eyeing Kylo sideways. “Well...I mean, we thought maybe...her.”

“She’s dead,” he says. His throat’s dry. He’s been reluctant to drink the pond water, the purification tablets giving it a clinical flavor that’s worse than the muddy liquid in his canteen.

Mitaka’s silent for a moment. Then, the question bursting out of him _—_ “How’d you kill her?”

“ _What?_ ”

“And soldier 2187. Finn,” the kid adds on an afterthought. “What was it like?”

 _This bloodthirsty little fucker_.

“You ever killed anyone, Mitaka?”

“Yeah.” Defiant, lying.

“It was like that.”

Because she’s present tense. And he can’t talk about her to spin out the massacre that this kid wants to hear. Campfire stories for the boy-scout. Terror’s fun when the sun’s down and there’s a lonely sound in the wind, but only when it’s happening to someone else. Someone else, somewhere far away. If he talks, Mitaka will see through the words he twists, and he’ll give himself away. He’ll give her away.

That she’s alive.

She has to be alive.

He can’t hate her if she’s dead.

Mitaka can’t press Kylo for more details if the kid’s going to keep up his pretense about being a killer, so he sulks in wary silence, maybe imagining a sun-kissed throat between Kylo’s hands, the way her skin is pink over the angle of her cheekbones with warming against his sleeping bag’s lining, how blue veins flower behind her ears, his fingers seeking the pulse point fluttering just beneath her jaw _—_ and then, _crack_.

He didn’t do it. He could’ve. But he didn’t.

And she has to be alive.

Kylo’s drinking rash gulps from his canteen to cool his flushed face when Hux and Phasma return to the tarp, empty-handed. They’ve been gone a long time.

“Couldn’t see in the dark,” Hux gives a sulky excuse. His zipper’s down, and Phasma’s dusty at the knees.

_Seriously?_

At least they were spending their time away like the shitheads they are, instead of plotting against him.

“Take your damn helmet next time, and use the visor’s infrared lighting,” he snaps.

Of course, some people talk during sex...A waste of energy better directed otherwise, he’s always assumed. What’s the need for discussion during such a primal, physical act? But his traitorous mind wonders, what would Rey—

Kylo drinks again, sloppily. “Mitaka says you’ve started keeping night shifts. I’m taking first watch.”

Hux looks like he’s about to protest _—if the girl’s really dead like you say she is, what’s the point?_ Phasma elbows him in the ribs, gaze narrow. Calculating. Kylo can see cogs whirring behind her light gray eyes. If he stays up tonight, he’ll have to sleep tomorrow. They’ll be rid of him that much sooner if he takes this first watch.

And if the girl’s actually still alive, and that’s why he’s decided to keep the watch? Maybe Phasma doesn’t know what to do with such a possibility yet, but she’ll find some point of leverage if it’s true.

Which...is concerning. But fuck her, he’s not going to sleep for a good long while.

The others bed down, suspicious, twitchy from the sound of a sleeping bag’s zipper drawn up, the microfiber lining’s crinkle. Kylo pretends to ignore them, back turned into the tarp, eyes fixed out on the gasoline canisters.

He waits for Rey to appear for the whole night. He’s an idiot for hoping. Hoping that she’ll come back. If she’s alive...

And he waits through the next night, though he’s dazed with adrenaline and exhaustion. Phasma’s mouth tilts, half-smirk, half-scowl when he insists on sitting the watch again. Can’t kill him yet, but there’s an opportunity she’s spotted, just maybe...

Rey doesn’t come.

Of course she doesn’t. She’s far away with Finn. Or she’s dead.

The night’s half-gone, its deeper reaches giving way to a skein of dappled dawn on the furthest eastern horizon line, when a stillness shakes him out of his comatose crouch, depression weighing down his reddened, worn-out eyes. It’s...too quiet, the undercurrent of desert life suddenly, perfectly still with alarm and warning. It’s the silence of moving without making noise.

She wouldn’t have come if she’d had any other choice. Running from Finn like she always runs, returning to her dugout because she’s a creature of habit, and there’s nowhere else to go...He’d taken her reserve gasoline, and left her with only her jerky.

It seems like too much to hope for.

But here she is, returning to the First Order’s pond like him, because she’s desperate. A pale, gaunt shape with an outstretched arm toward the canisters, she’s alone. _Alive_.

His lips shape her name. Soundless.

He knows it’s her.

A tiny slosh of liquid. Hands trembling.

Kylo stands. Slowly, so slowly that she can run if she wants to. The form that is Rey doesn’t move.

Strangely, dreamlike, he walks to her. She...waits for him.

 _I’m sorry_ , he tells her, or perhaps he just thinks the words.

 _I know_ , she says, or doesn’t say.

They stand like that for a long time while dawn creeps past the horizon, a dangerous thread unspooling across the desert. A motionless, perfect moment where his exhaustion and his battles against Hux and Phasma don’t matter.

And then the tarp stirs, an arm outflung with waking striking the canvas weave. A grunt.

 _Run_.

She says it, or he does.

No quad. No backpack, no protein bars, no canteen. All left behind under the tarp, ready next to him where he’d sat through his watch. Forgotten now. Just his gun, the clothes he wears, and the thermal sleeve he’s spread across his legs to keep warm enough to stand without creaking joints. Hardly anything. He’s only just come back, only just marked out some control, and maybe it’s all for nothing, but _—_

 _Run_.

He does.

They do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "They’ve gotten back into the same place, but they still haven't gotten down and dirty!" Well, my friend, here's Dark Rey and Jedi Ben together in a very small elevator, A/B/O pheromones taking the reins in [Kill Me Softly](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14625816)!
> 
> If you're enjoying Sun, Sand, and Stone, tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Are they finally going to have a civil chat?

Rey feels him before she sees the huddled shape of his body beside the First Order’s tarp. Maybe this warm, prickling sensation crawling from her belly and up her spine _—_ this bone-deep _recognition—_ is the just result of the obvious conclusions she’s drawn in the past day; where else would Ren go? Of course he’s come back to the First Order, to the people who tried to kill her. Of course he’d keep sentry over his precious gasoline, a dark and looming shadow eclipsing the others, taking command. Maybe. But she knows it’s him, even in pure, perfect darkness, without firelight to lure and illuminate.

Yes, Rey feels him.

Stunned, hand outstretched toward the gasoline canister she’s come for, she stands. She has to get fuel for Finn’s quad. The one she’s stolen. Hers now, but it’s still foreign to her. She can’t be stranded without gasoline, even in her dugout’s safety. That safety’s broken. Ren has taught her this, invading the riverbed and then driving her away. So she’s risked this run, her only option, and now she’s here.

And so is he. The whites of his eyes flash, waking.

 _Rey_.

Her name, a murmur in the air, a brush of desert wind across her mind. But it’s him.

Her hands tremble at this touch that isn’t a touch. And she hates it. But when he rises from the ground and walks toward her, slowly, so slowly, she doesn’t move. She doesn’t sprint away with her prize and her dignity. She waits. It’s not even a choice.

 _I’m sorry_. Again, those words.

She says nothing, not trusting her mouth. She bites her lips together. A hint of breath passes between them, answering him with the warmth within her lungs when she can’t. _I know_.

Now what?

If he continues forward, if he reaches out to touch her, to take her in those long-fingered hands, she’ll strike him down with her staff. She won’t regret splitting his skull apart as he’s split her open. It would be the easy way. Violence. She longs for him to reach out, so that she’ll be safe from him. But he makes no move to touch her. Once he halts a few yards distant from the canister pile, he doesn’t move again at all. He just...waits.

And so they stand facing one another, her hand brushing against the gasoline canister she’s been siphoning into a bottle in her satchel. He doesn’t look at her thieving fingers, or the evidence of her guilt hanging heavy at her side. He looks at her face, like she’s a ghost and he’ll memorize her before she fades with dawn.

_Why?_

She knows the answer, and doesn’t want to know it.

Somehow, they’re both still alive.

Ren’s face is haggard, features drawn down with an exhaustion that seems to burn him from the inside out. Lips curved into a concave line, the creases along his temples grainy and deep. His reddened eyes are flames, gathering the first hints of daylight into themselves. Transfixed, Rey can’t look away. He won’t let her.

She hates herself for not wanting to.

If this is survival with Kylo Ren alive in the desert, she doesn’t like it. Because now she’s burning. Burning with the betrayal at finding him gone from the dugout, leaving behind her jerky wrapped in a protective protein foil, stealing her stolen gasoline. She’d needed him gone. And he’d gone. She’d wanted that.

And not wanted it, shivering on the dirt floor in an empty expanse that’s too large.

 _Not fair. None of this is fair_.

So she burns, staring back at him, boiling with a violence that she calls hatred. Hate is easy.

The fiery moment lasts forever.

And then someone moves under the tarp.

She’s so, so grateful, because _—_

She knows what to do, now.

 _Run_.

Her body propels her forward, muscles contracting and lengthening in a furious speed from her calves, her thighs, arms pumping against her ribcage, fingers fisted so tightly that her knuckles shine white, five sickle moons ridging through the flesh on each hand. Ren keeps pace just behind her, a heavier runner, jarring the ground beneath his feet with their sprinting pace, but nearly as fast as she is. Nearly.

Why? Why is he running? He’s not chasing her. Just running. But she won’t ask herself this. Not now. Just _run_.

She’ll outstrip him eventually. She knows she can. She’s built to run distances, tall and slender and strong. He’s better at short lengths, immensely powerful but laboring under the dangerous mass of his body, the breadth of his chest and shoulders. So Rey can lose him, tearing away while he founders.

But she doesn’t.

She promises herself that this is because she’s conserving energy. There’s no pursuit behind them. Not yet. So there’s no need to drain herself with pushing her body faster, to make herself sweat away necessary moisture. She keeps that energy in reserve, for when pursuit comes.

And it will come, eventually.

But if the glimmering sunrise is any indication, the First Order won’t hunt them today. The heat will be searing in a hour, deadly by full daylight. No one will leave shade or water for a chase across the nearly featureless landscape, beset with mirages and fatal sunstroke.

So she runs at a steady, conservative pace. Fifteen miles, running around 11 mph. She’ll make it back to the dugout before the sun’s full scorch punishes the earth.

Ren drops back after the first few miles, breath whistling through his nose, head lowered, pushing against the heating air. Already, there’s a smoky shimmer on the horizon. Dangerous.

But Rey slows her pace, keeping the distance equal between them. Too far away to touch, close enough to hear him breathe, to know if he’s gasping too hard, if oxygen-rich blood flooding his brain will overload the neurons and push him over into unconsciousness.

“ _Go_ ,” he heaves out behind her, flushed hands pressed against his upper thighs to push his legs through the sand and rock. In his dark clothes _—_ completely inappropriate for the conditions; does he _want_ to get sunstroke? _—_ he’s overheating much faster than she _._

“Chasing me’s harder without your quad, isn’t it?” she barks to motivate him, her breathing steady. If Ren stops running now, his muscles will cramp and lock. If he falls on stiff legs, he’ll never get up again. His body bloating under the sun will attract carrion birds _—_ a sign post for the First Order pursuit to follow, leading them to Rey’s dugout.

Rey’s strong, but not strong enough to haul his deadweight body the remaining eight miles to the riverbed. Neither of them would like her doing that. So Ren has to stay upright, and stay moving.

He glares at her, breathing in gasps, wincing at the sting of sweat dripping into his eyes. “You’re the only one...insane enough...to make this run...” His feet shuffle forward.

 _Good_.

“Insane, but alive,” she taunts him.

“You left your goddamn water supply...and took off into the desert…”

Angry is good. Anger is motivating. She really, really doesn’t want to drag him, hooking him under his arms and hauling him backwards, or hitching his shoulder over hers if he’s still conscious, his chin colliding against the crown of her head with every step. She doesn’t want to touch him.

“Yeah?” Rey’s panting a little now, pretty damn angry herself. That’s not good, because the best way to conserve water in her body is to keep her mouth closed and breathe through her nose, but _oh_ , he’s got a _nerve_! From the scanty landmarks she’s memorized, it’s another five miles to the dugout. If they’re going to make it into the shade before the sun burns high enough in the sky to rain down heat exhaustion, they’ll need to pick up their pace. “You think that’s insane? You know what would’ve been _really_ insane?”

“ _What?_ ” he growls.

“Staying there, with you! There was no way in hell I was _—_ ”

“Why?”

“Because you’re the most dangerous thing in this desert, Ren!”

He stumbles, surprised or on the verge of collapse.

Rey turns and sprints back toward him through the heat, pissed to be retracing ground she’s already covered, to be having this conversation. So what if she started it? “Move your feet. Now!”

“I am!”

“You run like an old man!”

“Yeah? Well, you _—_ ” But he stops himself, and that’s...good. Because he pushes sweat-plastered hair off his forehead, staring at her where she’s standing with the rising sunlight on the exposed nape of her neck, silhouetted and burning. Staring at her as he’d looked when they’d crossed gazes like swords in the last unspooling hour of night by the First Order’s pond.

And she doesn’t want to hear those words from him.

She strides up until they’re chest to chest. “Don’t make me drag you, Ren!”

He wastes breath on a ghost of a laugh, looking down his long nose at her. “I’ll try.”

Blessed silence, for a moment. They’re barely at a walking pace. Almost side by side. Not touching.

Three miles left.

Then _—_ “I’m not the most dangerous thing out here, Rey.”

 _Damn_ him for saying her name like that, all unexpected and normal. Rey jerks back. She crosses her arms, trapping rising heat against her breasts, sweat pooling under her clothes. She takes a snippy, academic tone to match her crossed arms. “I guess you could make a case for the rattlers, but _—_ ”

“You’re more dangerous than they are.”

“I’m not venomous,” she spits, unsure whether to feel insulted or complimented. It’s not a feeling that she understands. She takes refuge in vitriol.

“No?” Ren has the audacity to twitch his mouth in a grin.

With no possible response to this, Rey keeps quiet for several long minutes.

Walking, they’re a mile from the riverbed dugout when Ren falters, knees buckling. It’s fiercely hot. “No, it’s fine. I’m just...tired. Haven’t slept in a few…”

“You’re dehydrated.” Rey digs into her bag and shoves her canteen at him. It pains her to offer up her precious water, her life-source, but she can’t have him falling down now. His body’s too close to the dugout, a sure giveaway if the First Order comes searching for her.

For them.

Ren hesitates, staring at the canteen, its metal sides glistening in the direct sun. “I left mine. Back at the pond...”

“So we’ll share right now,” she snaps. Does he have to make this harder than it already is, debating her under the broiling sky? “Drink.”

“Shouldn’t I just...suck on a stone...something…”

“No.” She glares at him.

“I’m trying to be...helpful…”

“When did that ever help? Sucking on rocks doesn’t work well. Covering your face and keeping your mouth closed is better, but since you’re already panting…” She shakes the canteen, making him listen to the water sloshing inside it.

His fingers tremble when he takes the bottle from her, not touching her hand, though her palm and fingers are splayed across the canteen’s sides. He seems to try to moderate his drinking, not wanting to empty their supply, but the taste of muddy moisture on his cracked lips visibly shatters his control. He drinks like a starving man, water trickling down his chin, mingling with smears of sweat and dust on his exposed throat, threading around her bruise on his shoulder, a nasty lavender and yellow with age, dipping lower _—_

“Enough.” She grabs the canteen from him, rough and angry. Tongue dry. “Drink too much, and you’ll vomit it up again. I won’t let you waste the water.”

Ren wipes the back of his hand across his mouth, then licks the wetness gathered on his skin. He’s steadier. “How much further?”

“Ten minutes, maybe. Pull yourself together, or I will.” Shoving the canteen back into her bag, Rey strides forward, dust puffing around her hard footfalls. He follows.

“You should drink, too _—_ ”

“I’m fine.” She hitches up her shoulders sharply, throwing off a phantom hand.

“Okay.”

And now he’s _agreeing_ with her?

“Unlike you, I know my limits. I’ve actually bothered to learn how to survive out here!”

“I know you have. And I don’t. I haven’t.”

This _man_. Who the hell is Kylo Ren?

She’ll think about this later. For now, she’s hot and angry, and that’s easier.

Ten minutes become seven, seven becomes three, three becomes _here_. Rey’s boots find a widening crack in the earth—a long-dry tributary—and dig into it, following the line as it empties nothingness into her riverbed. She hops down out of the sun and into the bank’s shade, Ren following heavily, hitting the ground with too much force. She points to the dugout.

“Get in, and stay quiet. You need to lower your heart rate and let your brain cool down.”

“What are you going to do?”

She brandishes her dirty gauze wraps at him and tilts her head toward the river stones. “You drank most of my reserve.”

He doesn’t fight her on this. Annoyed, she turns her back on him and sets to work balanced on her heels, prying up a rock and scooping down into the earth to find a moist squish of mud between her fingers. She’s thirsty, she’s tired, but she won’t show him weakness.

Not again.

Once she’s forged water from soil into her canteen, she tosses it into the dugout. She doesn’t look to see where it lands. “Drink.”

There’s a metallic _clink_ as the cap is unscrewed, then a hiss of water falling from the mouthpiece, and the burbling of bubbles finding their way to the bottom of the canteen and exploding with a soft, breathy sigh into the emptied space as it’s upended.

Rey licks her lips and bends closer over the muddy hole she’s made, burying her fingers in the silt. She’s all right. She’s fine.

The air whistles with sudden movement, and Rey’s canteen lands beside her in the bank’s thin, gray shadow.

“Now you,” Ren’s voice says.

She debates not drinking, to spite him. But then she notices that he hasn’t screwed the canteen’s cap on tightly enough; water is leaking around its edges, staining the ground, vanishing. Wasted. And she _wants_ that water. So she drinks, trying not to think of his mouth where her own lips are now curled around the metal circle.

She wipes the canteen clean with particular fastidiousness when she’s swallowed as much as her stomach can handle, hoping he’d done the same.

Probably not, the bastard.

Definitely not, since he’s laughing. Coughing.

“Shut up.”

That just makes him laugh and cough harder. Eventually he quiets, but his lips twist into a smirk when the heat eventually drives Rey into the dugout, needing the temperature’s tempering that only happens underground, even better than shade. She sits up against the dugout’s far wall, well away from him, and just glares.

And notices that his flush hasn’t faded as it should’ve. His face and neck and exposed arms are red. So red.

“Have you been moving around? Your heart rate should’ve gone down…”

Ren shrugs.

Rey takes that as a _yes_.

“Fine, kill yourself if you want to,” she mutters. “See if I care.”

“I was trying to make sure we don’t _get_ killed,” he retorts.

Rey’s objections to that plurality die on her tongue when Ren raises a hand, gripping his ugly pistol so that muzzle’s pointed out into the riverbed. Rey hates guns, but she knows enough to see the clip’s locked in, and the safety’s off.

“They’ll come for us. I...they know where I came from, coming back to the pond.” A confession. He’s told the First Order where to find her dugout.

_Fuck you, Kylo Ren!_

All Rey trusts herself to say is, “I don’t want that thing in here.”

“What, you’re going to fight them off with your quarterstaff?”

“It worked with you!”

“I wasn’t trying to kill you, Rey.”

She scowls at him, at his calm words in the face of everything he’s done. “That’s what Finn said. That if you’d wanted to kill me, I’d be dead.”

Ren blinks at her with half a frown, like he’s surprised and a little confused. A whole lot guilty. “He’s...right. An idiot most of the time, but right.”

“That surprises you? Finn’s actually pretty good at _—_ ”

“No,” he cuts her off. “I’m surprised that you still think I might’ve been trying to kill you. And not that it matters, but where is he?”

“I’m not telling you that.” If Ren finds out about Poe’s car...why the thought makes her cringe, Rey decides not to investigate. She’s getting really good at ignoring things like that, skittery whispers in her head and on her skin.

“Alive?”

“You think I’d kill him?”

“No. But I think you’re dangerous, Rey.”

“I don’t...I’m not…” she stumbles over her tongue. People around her do end up dead. “He...he’s fine.” Alive, and maybe even happy. With pilot Poe Dameron, dashing and handsome and devil-may-care against the end of everything.

“But you parted,” Ren prompts her.

She forces out the words between her teeth. The harsh, unforgivable truth. “I stole his quad and I left him behind.”

“Really.” Skepticism radiates off him, more potent than heat.

He can’t think well of her, doubting her hardness. She won’t let him. She won’t be influenced by wanting him to...oh, _fuck_ this. “Yes, really.”

“You going to steal my gun and leave me here again?”

“I hate guns, but don’t tempt me, Ren.”

“A survivor like you, I thought you’d pick up and use anything you came across. Not guns?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because.”

“Have you ever used one?”

“Yes.” Her lashing word comes as a whisper. Yes, she’s shot a gun. Shot and killed with one. There’s a reason she carries a staff. She could’ve taken the shotgun from the dead man in the truck, hunting her like an animal for what she wouldn’t give him. _Her body, her death_. But she didn’t. Even now, with the First Order primed to come after them, she won’t touch the weapon in Ren’s hands. Not to save the water and the dugout and him, and certainly not to save herself.

She can’t trust herself with a gun. What it might make her do...

“So it’s not that you don’t know how. You know how to use a gun, but you’ve decided that your stick’s a better defense.”

“I don’t have to explain myself to you.” She doesn’t. And it’s a damn _quarterstaff_!

With her staff, she can die as herself.

“You’ll tell me, eventually,” he says. “You want to. I can see it in you.”

Rey curses her transparent face. She frowns, which is safe.

“All right.” Ren rolls onto his back, tucking the pistol into his belt and lacing his fingers behind his head. Deceptively casual. Watchful. “Not now, but eventually. When you’re ready.”

Like _hell_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nope, they're not. Did you really think they would? We're only at Chapter 13!
> 
> If you're enjoying Sun, Sand, and Stone, tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! Seriously, I live for your comments. :)
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.
> 
> (In other news, for those of you who've expressed interest in the [Wild West AU](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/post/173583264515/reylo-wild-west-au-holding-the-mustang-to-a): the fic's first act is drafted. So excited to share this soon-ish!)


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Our boy gets hot and bothered...
> 
> Oh my word, check out these absolutely stunning pop art pieces that MrsViolet created of post-apocalyptic [Rey](https://mrsvioletwrites.tumblr.com/post/174159827538/reylo-post-apocalypse-au-requested-by) and [Kylo](https://mrsvioletwrites.tumblr.com/post/174176858993/reylo-post-apocalypse-au-requested-by)! I swoon. 
> 
> (And if you're not already reading her fic [The Premier and Her Liege](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14591493/chapters/33721449), then what are you doing?)

Kylo wakes, and he is burning. He is the desert, and the sun is at its peak, and rays sizzle down upon the expanse of him, and he burns. The inside of his skull is an inferno, flames piercing through the sockets behind his eyes, peeling away his tongue so that he can’t scream at the ripping, searing agony, though he writhes and flails and opens his mouth in a soundless, inhuman cry. His flesh is gone, his bones bleach, but still the pain goes on, and if he’s dead, why doesn’t it stop?

_Please, please make it stop!_

“I’m trying!” A grunt. “You,” another grunt, “need to _—ugh—_ stay still long enough that I can _—ouch!_ Goddamnit, Ren, that was my nose! _—_ elevate your head and get your shirt off _—no, stop it—_ then slap this mud on your chest.” A third grunt. “It’ll lower your core body temperature, and _—_ I’m trying to help you! Quit moving around!” A hand connects with his desiccated cheek and cracks his head back. “And stop yelling!”

Yes, that’s his tongue, bloody behind his teeth where he’s bitten it. Not burned away. Which means...dreaming. Dugout. Rey.

“It’s your own damn fault, getting heatstroke,” she’s muttering to herself. “If you’d only been still when I told you to…”

Heatstroke. Burning. Yes, he can name this thing that’s hurting him. Names are power…

 _Sergeant Ben Solo is dead_. _I promise, I promise_ , to the watcher in the back of his mind, evaluating him for weakness. But he already knows he’s weak...

A whisper of cold brushes his blistered flesh from neck to waist, and then something whacks him in the solar plexus with unsympathetic force. He expels air on a gasp instead of a scream.

“Good. There. You’ll feel better in a minute.”

The pressure abates from the sensitive point on his breastbone and spreads down his chest, slick and scratchy at once. Mud? Yes...she’d said something about mud. Carried from the riverbed in her wraps and dumped onto his burning body, the soil’s water content lowering his temperature...using the gauzy cloth like a sponge, she’s spreading mud over his chest and under his arms, into the crooks of his elbows. She packs it against his exposed pulse points, cooling the blood beating there before it surges back toward his core and his brain. The cold on his skin and the heat within his body brace against each other, achieving stillness, a moment of stasis, a changing tide pushing against its opposition with perfectly equal force. Then the mud melts, and heat returns.

He drifts.

His skin aches from the cloth’s rough swabbing with a second load of mud, a third, a fourth, friction warming the already overheated surfaces on his chest, his neck, his arms. He winces, whimpers.

“Sorry, I’m sorry.” Something else replaces the cloth. Firmer, smaller, the pressure concentrated in six points. A palm and five fingers. Rubbing the chilly substance over his skin. Lowering his temperature, keeping him alive.

Rey’s hands on his naked, filthy chest.

His brain sparks, the pressure inside his skull gone for a single, stunning moment as every rapid-firing neuron in his body overloads and cuts out. The insides of his eyelids burst with pricks of light, and the sensation is...is...

 _This_.

He’s half-dead, but he’s a man. And fuck, he wants to live. But for this touch, he’ll drift himself to the very edge of the precipice, toy with stepping off into nothingness, walking just along that line. This touch _—_ it’s not tender. Ungentle, almost outright hostile. He wouldn’t have expected anything else from her. It’s almost enough. If he could just see the expression on her face while she touches him, see the scrunched wrinkles that her nose makes when she’s annoyed, the furious flashing in those hazel eyes, hating him, touching him, he’d be content _—that’s a lie—_ but his eyelids are swollen shut, and he can’t. He can only feel.

 _Torture_.

He’ll burn for this. With pleasure…

“Ren. _Ren_. You need to stay conscious.” A hard pinch on his ribcage.

Her nails are blunt with work and wear. They don’t hurt _—_ not worse than the searing heat, anyhow. But Kylo gasps.

She withdraws her hands like he’s stung her. A quaver threads through her voice when she says, “That’s good. Stay awake, or I’ll smack you again.” The canteen she holds to his mouth knocks against his teeth with a metallic shock.

“Wasn’t...a slap…” He tries to laugh with his mouth full of water, that quaver and her clumsiness with the canteen tickling something low in his stomach. Giddy, on fire.

“Do you _want_ me to slap you?”

He imagines her sitting back on her heels, glaring, lifting a tired arm from where she’s been resting her elbows on her knees. Raising an open hand, preparing to bring it down hard on his cheek again. The print of those fingers and palm would show pale against his fever-reddened skin. Her mark. He’s tempted to goad her into making it.

But Rey wouldn’t like him manipulating her into violence, however much he wants her like this. A niggle in his overheated brain _—_ the instinctual, reptilian part, the part that’s so aware of her close beside him that it’s almost like gravity, pulling him out of himself and to her _—_ warns him against it. She’d hate him for this.

 _She’s not afraid of violence against herself_ , that bit of his mind whispers. Why hasn’t he listened to it before? Maybe it’s a fever madness, and he’ll lose it if he doesn’t die from the heatstroke that Rey’s battling with life-giving mud and exhausted, injured hands and furious words as if it’s her own mortal enemy, not his. _She’s afraid of what she’ll do to everyone else_.

“Ren! Am I going to have to slap you?” How can she shout without breaking her voice above a murmur? He _feels_ the lash of it against his ears, her rage worming into his brain. And her fear. Angry mutterer, Rey from Nowhere...

Drifting again.

“Answer me!”

His tongue flops, dry and unwieldy. A useless muscle behind his teeth. “What...should I...say?”

“Whatever. Just keep talking.” Another load of mud splats onto his chest. She rubs it fiercely into his skin. The edges of her nails leave patterns in the sludge, nicking against him; he can’t open his eyes to see the designs _—_ the swelling in his eyelids beats a localized headache against his irises _—_ but he knows they’re there on his body. The coolness feels good, with thin whispers of wind brushing against him from the riverbed.

Rey’s unsympathetic, practical hands feel better.

Are they unsympathetic, these fingers? _Yes_ , his brain says. _Of course they are. She’s only keeping you alive because she doesn’t want to have to dispose of your body. And it’s a fucking_ inconvenience _, Kylo Ren, battling for your survival when she needs to be looking after her own_.

His body tells him otherwise. The way she avoids touching certain parts of him while roughly pushing and shoving on other places. She’ll slap mud against his chest and arms and neck and forehead, but her hands never stray to other points of heat: puffed, searing eyelids, mouth, nipples, the lines of his abdomen that lead beneath his waistband. She’s neglecting the femoral arteries in his thighs. Plastering mud against these arteries would cool his lower half faster than dousing his arms in silt again. But her fingers avoid lingering.

Or they linger for the briefest moment, then skitter away.

He’s half-disgusted, half-intrigued to find that his body can respond when he’s in this state, blood pooling low in his abdomen, cooling his extremities by a fraction of a degree. He’s _all_ embarrassed when Rey makes a sudden noise in her throat and lifts off her hands so hard and fast that the ground vibrates where she’s lost her balance on her heels and had to sit down with a thump.

“Tell me about that sergeant,” she says, voice thrumming with undercurrents that he can’t read. They’d be plain across her too-expressive face; if only he could _see_. But maybe it’s better that he can’t read her, because she follows up with a verbal strike to the gut, wilting him as effectively as if she’d physically sunk her fist into his groin. “Is he one of the men you’ve killed? Ben Solo?”

So he’d said that part aloud. And now there’s that name on her lips. _Ben Solo_. _Ben, please!_ The name he’s heard from her in nightmares, begging him not to kill her while he strikes her down, eyes dry for the man who watches him execute the girl, execute his own weakness, splitting his spirit to the bone while he splits her open, too _—_

 _Fuck_.

“Who was he?”

Kylo Ren swallows, breathing too hard. But if the words rise easily on his tongue, practiced and accepted deep into himself, necessary and polished with use, they choke him as he expels them. “Nothing. He was nothing. He _—_ ”

“You killed him.”

“Yes. He was weak and foolish, so I destroyed him.” _I didn’t kill you._

Her silence is turbulent, but opaque. And then _—_ “Why?”

“Why? Because he was _weak_ , he was nothing, he _—_ ”

“What’d he done to you, that you hate him so much?”

 _Present tense._ Goddamn Mitaka.

“I don’t hate him. I did, and then I killed him _—_ ”

“No.” Even with closed eyes, he sees Rey shaking her head. “You hate him. Here, now. Why?”

“I don’t want to _—_ ”

“I’ll keep you conscious any way I can, Ren. I don’t care what you want. _Tell me about Ben Solo_.”

“No.” _Please don’t make me_. Promising the pain in his head, the looming discipline: _I won’t tell her, I won’t..._

“You were dreaming about him, that night in the dugout when you grabbed my wrist and wouldn’t let go. Do you remember?”

 _I won’t, I won’t, I won’t_...but how could he forget? Shame burning him hotter than sunstroke even while he brought himself to a shuddering release _—_ She remembers the night differently, of course. Thank god. But what she remembers…

“You were screaming,” she says. “ _I didn’t want to. But I did. I am_. Were you killing Ben Solo?”

Other words slip out, circumventing his control, his brain addled with the pressures of memory and heat. “I’m always killing Ben Solo.”

_No—no! I didn’t mean to tell her, I’m sorry, I’m weak—_

A soft inhale. But it’s not for him, that sound. She’s breathing for Ben fucking Solo.

“That’s why you...when I said... _Kylo Ren_ isn’t your name. Not your real name.”

“Yes,” he says between gritted teeth, to himself and to the voice in his mind that’s purring punishments, “it is.”

“It’s not the one your...you parents gave you.”

“I killed my parents!”

“Like you killed Ben Solo?”

“What does it matter?”

“Because I don’t think you’re a killer, Kylo Ren, or Ben Solo, or whatever your name is.”

“I’ve killed.”

“No. You haven’t. Not in the way you think. You let everyone believe you’re a monster. Dangerous. A killer. Maybe you even think it’s true.”

“I _am_ a monster. I’m all those things _—_ ”

“You aren’t. Those things, they’re a mask. Kylo Ren’s a mask.”

“No he isn’t _—_ ” And then he realizes what he’s said, where she’s led him.

 _He_.

Not _I_.

_No. NO!_

“It’s okay,” she’s saying, but it’s not okay, nothing about this is in any way even within spitting distance of being okay, “it’s not like I have anyone to tell. You’re still a secret.”

The only possible way to salvage himself, to protect himself from the displeasure of the watcher observing him inside his own head, is to attack. So he does, viciously, ignoring his aching brain, his burning skin. “You think that’s a secret? No one’s from nowhere, Rey. I’ve known you were lying about who you are, and I respected that, but now I want to know, because apparently you don’t care about personal boundaries, so why should I? Who the fuck are _you_?”

A stillness. A lack of breath. For a stunning moment, he can’t sense her at all, as though she’s become the nothing and nowhere he’s accused her of manufacturing to conceal herself. Then, awareness flows back across him with an exhaled breath _—Rey—_ and she says quietly,

“It’d be better if you kept a cool head right now. Literally and figuratively. But either Kylo Ren or Ben Solo can’t manage that. _So_. I’ve told you who I am. I’m Rey. Just Rey. It’s who I choose to be. You don’t have to believe me. But it’s true.”

She sounds...tired. So tired. She must be exhausted, keeping him alive, fighting him when she’s already injured herself. But he can’t stop. “You have a surname. Everyone does. You have parents _—_ ”

“I don’t.”

“A surname, or parents?”

“Either. None that I can remember.” Her voice rises through her weariness, breaking, cracking. “And since they clearly didn’t remember me, why should I bother with keeping anything from them? You know who your parents are, and you _—_ you killed them, or left them to join the First Order, and I just don’t _—_ ”

“I didn’t leave them! You don’t know what you’re _—_ ”

“Stop talking. You’re spiking your blood pressure.” A splat of mud accompanies her words, a hard _thwack_ that’s a punishment. For him, or her? Her fingers dig into his flesh, like she’s forcing herself to touch him. Punishment for them both.

“I thought you wanted me to _—_ ”

“I’ve changed my mind. It’s your own fault if you fall unconscious and never come back. Now, I’m going to sleep. Maybe we’ll both wake up. Maybe not.” A rustle. “Want to die comfortable in your sleeping bag?”

There’s a real possibility that he won’t wake up again, but he can’t think about that... _how harsh his punishment for failing the General’s orders will be_...so he goes for snark, for anger. Safety. “You trying to overheat and kill me?”

“You’re really not cold?” Her voice is incredulous, and that quaver’s back. Maybe it’s only ever been her teeth chattering. “You’re actually as sick as you look. The sun’s down and it’s freezing in here.”

“So use the sleeping bag,” he tells her.

“I won’t!”

“For god’s sake, Rey, why not?”

“Because it’s…”

Because it will start leveling the debt between them? No, she wouldn’t like that. Despite everything, that makes him grin, his lips cracking. Rey _shoves_ the canteen between his teeth.

“Who’s going to keep the carrion birds away from my carcass if you freeze solid tonight?” he asks, when she relents in her impromptu waterboarding.

“We’ll both be dead, so it won’t matter.” When she screws the canteen’s cap back on, metal chimes between her clumsy fingers. “I survived on my own without your fancy thermal sleeve before.”

“Fine.” It’s not like he cares. “If you’re not going to use it, I want it for a mattress. Give it to me.”

“No! You’ll overheat with fleece on your skin.”

“Well, if you’re determined to freeze to death, I’m not going to make it either, so the least I can do is die in comfort!”

Silence.

God, he wishes the swelling in his eyelids would go down enough to let him see her face while she works through this scenario.

Still silence. He imagines the unhappy curl of her mouth, the glare she can’t help directing at him, even though she knows he can’t see it. Pale from the cold, but with brights spots of temper high on her freckled cheekbones.

Then, a zipper whizzes along microfiber stitching.

“Shut up,” she tells him.

“I didn’t say anything...”

“But you’re thinking it.”

“Thinking what?”

Her huff is...embarrassed? Desperate to see, he tries to lift his eyelids and is met with an impotent flutter instead of movement. _Damnit_.

“You _know_ what.”

That her body is nestling into a place where he’s slept. They’re almost sharing that space. Same location, different times. In a pocket universe where the hours runs divergently, they’re sleeping together. And she’s thinking about it, too.

“Say it,” he challenges her, grinning through his fever so widely that he tastes blood. The pain of his splitting lips is good; it keeps blood flowing up and spilling through his mouth, instead of into his groin. It’s probably too dark for her to see if he hardens again _—_ but still.

“It’s just a sleeping bag, Ren. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s nothing.”

And because he’s an asshole, and he’s got sunstroke and because Swiss cheese has a better filter that he does, Kylo says, “Not to me.”

Very distinctly, Rey rolls over inside the thermal sleeve, putting her back to him.

He can’t help laughing, though it hurts.

“You can’t even see!” Rey demands, edging close to petulance.

He just laughs again.

She doesn’t respond, her silence radiating annoyance.

He doesn’t try her patience, and eventually, despite the pain and the headache and the discomfort of naked skin on the ground, when he can tell that the wind blowing down the riverbed is actually cold _—_ if he can feel anything except the searing heat, that must be good, right? _—_ he finally lets himself sleep. It’s the first time in three days that he’s been safe, and he falls into exhaustion like falling into a well, dark and deep and sudden.

He sleeps and sleeps and sleeps. He dreams. Not of punishment for abandoning his team, for failing to return to the military base on schedule. For his broken loyalty to the First Order. The General doesn’t trespass through his dreams; Snoke has every right to watch and intrude, to police his thoughts _—_ Kylo Ren is his creation, his property _—_ but he doesn’t. Not tonight.

Instead...flickering images. Water in his mouth. Not drowning, not with hands on his skin, cool and dry through a coating of mud. A wash of cold across his exposed abdomen, his hips. Nakedness. Hands on his thighs, fingers tracing bones and arteries, silty mud following in their wake. Rey’s hands. Softer while he sleeps, twisting against the dreams weighing him down, confining him to the hollow, narrow well when he wants...he wants…

“Don’t wake up, Kylo, or Ben, or whoever’s in your head right now. Please don’t wake up…”

Because she asks him, he stays asleep. Her hands wander, soothing.

It feels...good. He feels good. _Weak_...but painless, cool. _She_ feels good. _Rey_. He doesn’t want her to ever stop.

“Please,” his mouth whispers.

Her hands grow still, fingers digging against his hips. The scratch of her nails.

“You’re asleep,” she answers him, and he sighs. Her hands begin to move again. He swallows a groan at her goodness. “This is a dream.”

“A good dream.” And then he has to bite down on his tongue to stop himself from crying out.

Eventually, daylight wakes him. Red veins sprawl across his eyelids, burning patterns into his retinas. He frowns and squints _—_ and finds that his eyes are responsive, the swelling reduced. He peels back one eyelid, then the other, feeling his pupils contract to pinpoints after their long dilation. His head’s against the dugout’s far wall, his feet jutting out into the riverbed. Light dances across his toes, a ticklish image that has his stomach clenching. A quick downward glance confirms that he’s wearing his pants, and his gun is in its belted holster. Not naked.

 _Relief_.

She’s already stripped him bare, dragging Ben Solo’s name from him, tearing him open and taking, taking, taking things he doesn’t have to give. Things that belong to General Snoke. He won’t let her take anything else.

 _Relief_...and disappointment.

He turns his head and almost smacks his nose into the top of Rey’s skull. After staying awake through the night with him, she’s asleep. And close. Very close. Closer than she’d ever come while awake. Closer than she’s ever let him be to her. Close as dreaming. Her hair is loose from its buns, straggling over her ears. Her eyes are closed, daylight glowing over her face, gilding her eyelashes, the hollow beneath her chin, a hint of her teeth through parted lips. Half-smiling. She’s spread herself in unbridled luxury within his sleeping bag, limbs splayed like a little star inside a sack meant for someone twice her bulk, taking up most of the dugout’s floor space, pressing right up to the blurring line between them.

If there is a line anymore.

After last night, he’s not sure. He can still feel her hands, the clutch of her fingers on his hips. Phantoms. One of her dirty palms has curled over the sleeping bag’s edge, revealing a thumb that’s shrunk back from its dislocated swelling. She’d moved easily, strongly, confidently last night within her own body, over his.

While he dreamed.

And yet...Kylo’s feet are bare. Clever Rey, cleaning the mud from his thighs and dragging the trousers over his hips again.

But she’s forgotten his boots.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're enjoying Sun, Sand, and Stone, tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Will they touch hands??

The instant she wakes up, Rey knows two things:

One, that Kylo Ren is watching her, so close that they’re breathing the same air, inhaling each other’s exhale, then exhaling nearly against each other’s lips.

And two, that she’s not ever, ever, ever going to think about what happened last night ever, ever, ever again. She’s going to forget it, and the heat low in her belly, and the sounds he made under her hands. She’s going to forget the heady invincibility, the intoxication of feeling this powerful, dangerous man quake as she touched him, like her fingers were rain on starved ground. She won’t remember the way her flesh reacted to him, offering him a wetness from the core of her body, spreading between her thighs, mocking her efforts to conserve, to go without, offering him everything keeping her alive...She’s going to forget it so damn fast, bleaching her mind with will and sun and sweat and work, it’ll be like it never happened.

So Rey keeps her eyes closed, and she thinks of him splayed out before her, quivering while her fingers dance and her nails bite into his flesh, and then she _forgets_.

“You’re awake.”

Rey tries to even out her breathing, defying and denying him.

“You’re frowning, Rey. You smile when you’re asleep.”

“I don’t smile!” she snaps, her eyes popping open. She’s staring straight into his. No warning. Every mole, every eyelash, every crease from where a dimple would mark his cheek if he ever smiled _—_ she sees them with perfect clarity. She blinks. Closing her eyes is hardly better. So she opens them again.

“Were you dreaming?”

“About an ocean.” It’s true, usually. Sharing this treasured truth is better than telling him what’s really flickering through her mind.

“Which you’ve never seen.”

“Doesn’t mean I can’t dream about it.” And that opens too many doors in her head, so she pushes herself roughly away from him and grabs her canteen, slurping and wasting water. “You’re still alive,” she accuses him, screwing on the canteen’s cap with a vicious twist that twinges from her thumbs all the way up to her shoulder.

“Thanks to you.”

“Don’t. Don’t thank me.”

“Then what?”

“Just…” She makes an exasperated, fluttery gesture. “Just stay there. I have...things to do, and you’ll get in the way.”

“I’ll stand watch.”

“I’m pretty sure you can’t stand at all, let alone guard. Besides, look at the sunrise.” Rey points a finger at the thin line of sky peeking into the dugout. “There’s that...shimmer around the sun. Even so early in the day. Again, no one’s coming after us in this heat. It’ll break soon, though.”

“The weather?”

“Of course I mean the weather!”

“How does it break?” Ren’s recovered enough to push himself up against the dugout’s wall, muscles contracting along his arms and in his mud-smeared abdomen. Coiled steel springs. Rey averts her eyes to his face. He’s badly sunburned, worse than she is, with odd swaths and pockets of paleness where shadows from his over-large features cast shade on his face during yesterday’s trek _—_ beneath his nose, the dainty crease between his lower lip and his chin, a stripe beneath his eyebrows _—_ but his color doesn’t flare hotter with the mild exertion of sitting upright.

He’s tougher than she’s given him credit for being. But ignorant! Like a damn child out here. And she...she can’t spare the resources to look after him. So he’s going to have to pull his weight in the dugout, or _—_

But he’s still waiting for her response to...something. The weather?

“I’ve seen a storm rise when the air’s like this,” she tells him. Educating him, to avoid staring while he brushes dried mud from his forearms, cleaning himself from her filthy ministrations. Well, she’d saved his life, hadn’t she? “Sometimes I could hear thunder, and the lightning was bright enough to burn.”

“Rain?”

“Always too far away. It’s hard to judge distances, but...I could tell it was too far. The moisture would’ve been gone by the time I’d gotten to where the rain fell, and I’d have wasted gasoline reserves to get there and back. For nothing.”

“But it could rain. Here.”

“Not going to happen, Ren.” Better to squash hopes of an easy offering from the desert, than let it infect him.

“You’re the bleakest person I know.” There’s a sound of fabric slithering over skin _—_ a shirt pulled over his shoulders _—_ so it’s safe to glare at him again for the tingling, teasing note in his voice, perilously close to laughter. Laughing at her.

“I’m not bleak, I’m practical! And you’re going to have to be, too, if you want to survive. It’s hard out here. Anything that comes easily probably has a bigger cost than you can pay.”

“Like the First Order’s gasoline.”

“Yeah, like that. It was too easy to take. I should’ve known. Look where that got me!”

An expression twists his mouth and the corners of his eyes, an expression that something hollow within her chest reads as _hurt_. But then it’s gone, so fleeting that she’s grateful, and she must’ve been wrong. Because he’s so damn irritating again _—_

“Back in your dugout, with a sleeping bag, better defenses, and a sweet ride?”

“And then there’s you,” she fires back. Rey roots through her satchel to come up with her gasoline reserve. “Now I need to fuel up the quad. Don’t...do anything stupider than you can help.”

Ren grunts and settles back against the wall. Smirking, he unholsters his pistol, just to spite her.

Rey scoffs and scuttles out into the channel, then stalks up the riverbed to where she’s lowered the quad into concealment. She empties her purloined gasoline into the tank, which fills the quad’s compartment almost to the brim—it’ll run for close to two hundred miles, if her calculations are right about its ridiculously good fuel economy, and if she’s careful with her speed. Then she sits for a minute to let herself just...breathe. Away from him. Her hands explore the bike with instinctive interest, and she wanders her fingers over the gears and the throttle and the traction-tacky wheels in tactile curiosity, but she’s not really _seeing_ it. It’s a dangerous piece of machinery, and ordinarily she’d be thrilled to lose herself in it, savoring the craftsmanship, piecing out the pleasure for days to make it last, taking the bike apart and putting it back together, making it better than before, making it _hers_...but she’s too distracted. She’s pretty sure she’ll only break the quad if she starts unscrewing it and learning its heart.

Finn...and Poe...she hopes they’re alive, not lost in the wasteland with a fried navigation system...but if she’d stayed with them, _she’_ d be lost. Dependent, comfortable, losing herself.

Rey knows she’s meant to be alone. Anything else brings on the kind of insanity that led her to pull a trigger and end two lives. _Before_.

But that’s _before_ , and this is now. So what can she do about Kylo Ren and his shadow, Ben Solo?

She won’t kill him. Either of them.

It would be easier. But she won’t.

She can’t send him back to the pond. That’s killing him as surely as breaking his neck with her staff and leaving him for the buzzards. But she can’t just...take care of him. He needs to learn. He needs to help her if they’re going to survive together long enough to leave each other.

Which means that he needs a teacher.

Her sigh is a groan. She doesn’t want to. She doesn’t want to be close to him, squatting down on her heels beyond her dugout in the cooler evening hours, teaching him to spot tracks on the ground, invisible unless you know what to look for, the micro-variations in sand grain structures that mean something edible has recently passed. Nutrition can’t be allowed to escape.

 _It’ll be easier with two_ , a little voice whispers through the keyhole of a door she’s shut fast on last night. _Someone to watch your back. Another predator on your side. A pack. And if you get stung by a scorpion again, he’ll be here while the venom passes through your body. You won’t scream alone_.

Instinct’s a bitch, sometimes.

“Fuck off,” she tells the voice.

“Sorry,” Ren says. Right there, next to her.

“Don’t _do_ that!”

“What?”

“Anything! Sneak up on me, or _—_ ”

“I wasn’t sneaking up on you. You’re too twitchy to surprise. Usually.”

 _Usually_. Because knowing that he’s nearby with his stupid pistol has let her drift into the cesspools of her own tangled mind, worrying about semantics and principles instead of whether _that_ sound’s the wind picking up or a rattlesnake slithering through the riverbed toward her, or whether _that_ rumble in the distance is thunder from a storm breaking or a man in a truck with a shotgun.

She was...trusting him to keep watch. _Trusting_ him! Impossible. But there she’d been, toying with the quad, wondering about things that she’s pushed away since running from Takodana.

Her body’s already made up its mind. Her brain’s just slower to catch up.

 _It’s only for now_ , she whispers to herself, to the keyhole.

 _Now is all there is_ , the Rey that’s behind the fastened door whispers back.

“Just making sure you weren’t running off on me again,” Ren continues. He strokes a hand across the quad’s handlebars, its seat, the ignition switch. He flicks it lightly. Familiar and casual. Very close.

Rey makes herself breathe.

“Not running,” she says. “Just fueling the quad, like I said.”

“I’m not used to trusting you when you’re out of sight.” He hesitates. Then, “Sorry, if I startled you.”

“It’s...okay.” She’ll make it okay. Rey swallows back all the thousand things that are not okay in this moment, pushing them behind the locked door in her head, shoving them through the keyhole when they try to worm back into her brain via that little crevasse. She focuses on what is okay. “You’re doing well for your first day after heat exhaustion. Not sure it’s a good idea for you to be up and walking, but _—_ ”

“Would you let yourself spend a whole day lying down?”

“No. I have things to do.”

“Then so do I.” A beat. “So, who’s going to wash the breakfast dishes?”

Rey stares at him, nonplussed for a minute _—_ who the hell has cutlery out here? or would use precious water for stripping food remains off dishes when you’re better served licking them clean and getting the last nutrients? _—_ but then she realizes...he’s trying to be funny. He’s trying to make her laugh.

And that’s confusing, and kind of weird? But then she _is_ laughing, snorting so hard she can’t breathe, but it’s a good kind of choking that makes her ribs and stomach hurt, aching like they haven’t ached in a long time. She quickly realizes how much noise she’s making through the expectant morning’s silence, and Rey stuffs a fist against her mouth, biting into her knuckles while the hilarity wracks through her, staring at Ren with wide, tear-shining eyes.

“You snort when you laugh,” he says, when she’s finally quieted herself and has her hands pressed against the sweet soreness in her belly. He says it like he’s discovering this, a new fact in the universe.

Rey doesn’t know how to respond to that bland observation, or to the hesitancy in his voice. Wonder? No. Definitely not.

“Yeah?” she hedges, debating whether she should feel defensive instead of...warm. Warm isn’t good in the desert. Heat is dangerous. But right now, with the temperature hovering around eighty degrees in the riverbed’s shade, it’s almost pleasant. Like so many things with Ren, Rey doesn’t know what to do with that feeling. So she challenges: “Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Snort when you laugh?”

He opens his mouth with an instinctive denial that she reads all over him. Then, slowly, certainty fading from the rigid set of his shoulders and winged eyebrows, “I...I don’t know.”

“Oh.” They stare at each other for a minute. Or longer. And the sun must be wrong in the sky, because when Rey finally looks away to read the celestial time written across a glistening, cerulean horizon, the morning’s half-gone.

“What’s wrong? You’ve got that wrinkle over your nose again, like you’re smelling something rotten.” But there’s no sting behind his jibe. He’s tilting his head back to match Rey’s posture, scanning the sky. Searching.

“I wouldn’t be frowning if I smelled something rotten,” she corrects him absently. “Smell is good. It’d lead me to something worth scavenging. Putrefaction means there’s still meat left on whatever’s died...No. It’s just that there’s something wrong with the sun. The shadows.”

“Maybe the storm?”

“Maybe.” Grateful for that easy answer, Rey gives herself a shake. Her belly shakes loose a rumble at the same time. This, _this_ she can deal with. She charges back toward the dugout, Ren trailing in her wake.

“I...I left the protein bars at the pond. They were in my pack, with the gun clips and the knives. I didn’t grab it when we…There weren’t that many left, anyway.”

Is he _apologizing_?

“That’s...well, Finn said they were gross. And I have enough jerky,” Rey tells him. She doesn’t mention that he’s left a cache of weapons with the First Order. There’s no point. It’s already too hot to argue, and they both know how colossally he’s fucked up. She continues, “I’ll need to hunt today, though, if you don’t have rations.”

“I’ll help you. It’s my fault that you’re going to go through supplies faster. If I’d just _—_ ”

“But you didn’t. Regret’s kind of useless.” If her voice is hard, well, it’s a lecture he needs to hear. The protein bars could’ve kept them alive for weeks. It’s a lesson she has to remind herself of every damn day.

And she doesn’t want his apology. Apology means there’s a debt to be paid.

She shouldn’t have accepted his sleeping bag. Just because it felt good doesn’t mean it was a good idea.

Ren starts the day’s water production while Rey hacks her freshest rattlesnake jerky _—_ caught the day before she ventured to the pond for gasoline _—_ into strips with her stylus stone.

 _Shit_ , she hadn’t marked yesterday on her counting rock. She’d been so preoccupied with keeping Ren conscious, keeping him alive, that she’d forgotten. _Again_. She grabs the stone from her bag, bruising a nail on it with her anxious haste, and rubs out the old markings to make her new ones. The rock’s surface is having trouble holding clean lines now, but she scratches deep until the number appears in stark white shapes.

It’s okay. She’s caught herself in time.

 _Four thousand, two hundred fifty-five_.

When she returns to hacking at her jerky strip, it splinters under the vengeful stone until Ren raises his eyebrows at her. She tosses him his portion with a frown. He doesn’t say anything to the mutilated meat or her scowl, just chews. Then _—_

“Tastes like chicken.”

Rey points the stylus’s sharp end at him. “That’s so old, it’s not even funny.”

“Then why aren’t you frowning anymore?”

Rey quickly reassembles her scowl.

Ren _—_ or is it Ben Solo with the weird, grandpa-style humor, so at odds with the Kylo Ren persona? _—_ grins. He finishes his jerky, drinks from the newly filtered mud, and under-hands the canteen to Rey.

She drinks, then chokes off halfway through a swallow to polish the canteen’s nozzle with her sleeve. His eyes on hers are sinful with laughter, but he makes no sound. She glares while she finishes the canteen’s contents, then lobs it back at him to fill again, her throw a little too hard, making her shoulder ache. He catches the bottle before its metal cylinder breaks his nose, teeth flashing.

“You ever been bitten by a rattler before?” she asks him, to wipe that grin off his face.

It works like a charm.

“No.” His black-fringed eyes bore into hers. Though he’s not smiling anymore, this is worse. “But I’ve seen what happens.”

“So...so you know to be careful when we’re hunting,” Rey says, a little breathless.

“Why should I be worried? I’ve got you to protect me, and you’re the most dangerous thing out there.”

Rey decides to ignore the first part of his statement. “You keep saying that, but _—_ ”

“Yeah, I do. And you keep not listening.” Ren stands, a sudden loom of legs and shoulders blocking out the sun. Like he can’t sit still any longer. “You finished eating?”

She swallows the last of her jerky, and almost her tongue, too. “Y-yeah, okay. But we can’t go out right now. It’s too hot, and your sunstroke will flare up if you’re exposed. Then we’ll just have to do yesterday all over again...Besides, snakes are cold-blooded, so they’re a lot faster in the heat.”

“How the hell did Hux catch a rattler during the day without getting bitten, then?”

“Professional courtesy?”

“Ha!” He folds himself into the dugout, to her mingled relief and annoyance. Rey scoots herself against the far wall. “You’ve got the bastard’s number, that’s for sure.”

“You really hate him, don’t you?”

His gaze slips from her face, down to the crook of her arm. The snake’s puncture marks in her elbow are tiny, but Ren’s eyes lock on the exact spot where they pierced into her bloodstream. “Yeah. Yeah, I really do.”

Rey itches to cover that weakness in her flesh, but she forces herself to let Ren burn her with his gaze. Proving to herself that it doesn’t affect her. That she’s strong enough to bear it and glare right back, unmoved.

But she isn’t, and she wonders _—_ will he reach out with those huge hands to the twin dots of scarring, his touch balanced at the midpoint between frustration and...something she knows low in her stomach, with a warmth between her thighs that’s new and strange and frightening?

He doesn’t, so she doesn’t split his skull.

 _Relief_. She names her sensation when he glances away, a thread snapping. Or a steel ribbon coming unmoored. It’s not a lie!

“How could you tell the time without a watch or a clock, earlier?” His voice is deceptively normal. Maybe he hasn’t felt anything out of the ordinary.

Maybe there _is_ nothing unusual happening. It’s just that she’s hopped up on adrenaline and sleep deprivation, and it’s making her feel and see things that simply aren’t...there. Things that wouldn’t even occur to her, if she were well-rested and alone.

She’s only reacting this way because she’s not used to being around a man who isn’t trying to kill or hurt her. Which is all this is: coexisting, barely.

 _But you never felt anything like this with Finn or Poe_ , the Rey behind the keyhole in her head whispers.

The Rey in the dugout imagines slamming her hand against the whispering Rey’s face while she crawls into the riverbed and swings up her arm in a sudden arc to place her palm in outline against the western sky.

“I measured the time like this,” she tells him, imitating his calm, even if her actions are too quick, a little skittish. “Line up the lower part of your hand with the horizon, with your palm facing you. No, not like you’re giving the sky a high five!”

Ren flips his hand around, mirroring her posture.

“Now tuck your thumb in against your palm.” Her thumb twinges when she makes the motion. She grits her teeth and focuses herself through it, like she can’t feel that his attention has shifted from his extended arm and to her again, sunstroke against her exposed neck.

“Are you _—_ ”

“I’m fine, damnit. Each of your fingers represents about a quarter hour. Fifteen minutes. Maybe more, with hands like yours. Stack you hands until your topmost finger rests just under the sun.” Holding herself perfectly still so as not to lose her calculations, she stacks her hands once, twice, three times, four, and one more time again. Her last finger edges over the sun’s circle overhead. “The number of fingers calculates the time until sunset. If each finger’s fifteen minutes, then one hand is an hour. The sun’s five hands minus a finger for me, so that’s _—_ ”

“Four hours and forty-five minutes until sunset.”

“Yes.” Rey drops her hands to her sides.

Ren calculates again, lining up his palms and squinting against the brilliant light refracting down around them. “I think I’ve got eighty-minute hands. Twenty for each finger. Not as neat as yours.”

“Well, your hands are bigger.”

A moment, while he seems to examine the lines and creases in his own palms, as though he’s never seen them before. Then, all at once _—_ “Will you check my calculations?” He holds up a hand with his palm facing Rey instead of the sun above them. Asking her to line up her fingers with his own.

Asking her to take his hand.

“Please.”

And she...she...she’s abruptly trembling hard, harder than shivering, and his gaze is hungry, hungry and knowing and wanting her, waiting for her. Her fingers move of their own volition, rising and fanning against the air between them. If she presses her palm to his, will she ignite like a live wire? Will she survive?

Does it matter?

Her breath catches _—_ or his does, she can’t tell anymore, pulse thundering, her brain hissing with shorting static, erratic neurons going rogue, her own heartbeat broiling pink across Ren’s cheekbones, hotter than sunburn, a mirror of her own scalding face...

A slither and an impact. A scaly body hitting the riverbed’s floor, falling down into their crevasse from the desert’s level plane. Even reptiles seek shade during noon’s roasting temperatures, and this is no gecko, hissing and spitting and undulating toward them _—_

Ren’s shouting, grabbing her extended, scabby wrist, hauling her toward him, trying to push her behind him while the snake rears back its horrible triangular head, _rattling_ , _rattling—_

There’s no antivenom, just the hope of a dry bite, and that’s not a risk she can take _—_

Rey’s quarterstaff seems to fly into her hand from where it’s leaning against the riverbank. She twists free of Ren’s protective arms, lunging forward, leaping at the snake with her face curled into a snarl, a soundless, terrifying scream, and the sudden movement rising above it confuses the stupid creature _—_ it shifts its attention from Ren for one vital second _—_

Her staff cracks down just behind its head, so hard that vertebrae part. Internal decapitation.

A breath.

Then _—_ “Holy _fuck_ , Rey,” whispered almost reverently.

Rey raises her staff, the rattler rising too, twitching in its death throes, impaled on the pole’s blunt end. She stares from it, to a gaping, awe-struck Ren, then to the snake again, her mouth open with unspent screaming. She’s shoved the staff’s metal cap fully through the reptile’s body. She’s never caught a snake during the day, when they’re at their quickest and craftiest. It’s not possible to move as fast as she’s done. But she’s done it. And the only words coming through the darkness buzzing in her brain are inane and insane.

Before she passes out from the shock, Rey tells him, “I made dinner.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nope, no hand touch. I'm a damn tease. Sorry 'bout that.
> 
> If you're enjoying Sun, Sand, and Stone, tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We all already know that Kylo’s a Rey fan-boy…but here ya go!
> 
> Trigger warning: references of past sexual abuse.

Kylo manages to swoop his arms under Rey’s shoulders and knees before she hits the ground. Her lax hand releases the staff and its dangling snake, and he leaves them both in the riverbed while he edges into the dugout awkwardly on his knees, trying not to knock Rey against the ceiling or walls.

This girl.

This damn _woman_.

Attacking that snake like she had a deathwish, shoving him out of harm’s way while she went at the rattler like a wildcat, her silent scream echoing in his chest while he stumbled onto his ass, helpless, and she flung herself right at those hissing, venomous fangs. He’s still not sure his heart’s beating normally yet.

She’s totally insane.

And amazing. She’s so goddamn amazing, and he...he…

He’ll deposit her on his sleeping bag, then back away so he won’t scare her by being too close when she regains consciousness. But she fists her hand in his shirt when he lowers her onto the sack’s nylon casing. He can’t uncurl her fingers without hurting her _—_ she seems tiny, but she’s so strong, with the dirty half-moons of her nails sunk deep into his grimy collar _—_ so he hunches down on his heels and tries not to think about that hold she has on him.

Of course, as soon as he determines not to think about it, it’s all he _can_ think about. Tell yourself not to think about flying pink elephants or the people you’ve killed, and you can’t think about anything else.

_Last night._

Her hands not on his shirt, but on his naked skin.

 _Oh, hell_.

It’s not like he can avoid thinking about Rey when she’s this close, clinging to him with those chapped, perfect hands. So he thinks about other Rey things.

Like how he’d offered to teach her to fight.

She’d run.

Would she run now, if he offered again? Or would she let him teach her to protect herself from people like him, as she’s started to teach him about protecting himself from the desert?

Like how she’d swung her staff in a blur, leaping in front of him, which is maybe enough to baffle a snake, but won’t stop a bullet or one of Phasma’s javelin knives.

His chest spasms with a sudden gallop from his pulse; his body jerks. Rey frowns. She clutches tighter onto his shirt, eyes twitching behind their lids in a shudder. Or a nightmare. He holds his breath, lungs ready to explode, dizzy with a lack of oxygen. Her eyes don’t stop their roving; she’s surfacing out of her faint.

“Rey,” he says, when her lashes start to flutter. He doesn’t want to frighten her with waking to find that her unconscious self has reached for him. He gives her a minute to sort out where she is, forcing himself to be still. Then he gives a gentle tug on his shirt, just below her fingers’ grip. The fabric slides through her palm. She releases him. He sits back.

Only then does she open her eyes.

She looks...guilty. As if she knows she’s complicit in their lie that she hasn’t held onto him with all her strength while she was at her most vulnerable.

“Sorry,” she says.

Kylo frowns. “What for?”

“That was...really stupid of me. With the snake. And this is the probably the third or fourth time I’ve passed out in front of you _—_ ”

“Third,” he corrects her without thinking, then realizes how weird that must sound, like he’s been keeping score. But how could he forget the only times when she’s let him touch her without receiving a bruise or a blow in return? _Shit_ , how much of that has she read in his face? His goddamn expressive face.

Rey turns very faintly pink. “Yeah. Sorry.”

“You killed the rattler. Just fucking _impaled_ it, Rey,” he says, hurrying back to a topic that’s safe for both of them to discuss. “That was so _—_ ”

“Stupid, I know.” She frowns at him. “I wasn’t thinking, and I just _—_ ”

“Impressive,” he finishes.

Her eyes go wide, hazel and startled and so pretty beneath her straight, frowning eyebrows that it hurts him.

“ _Oh_.” That tiny sound goes straight through Kylo’s chest. “It...it was...I-I shouldn’t have...it was just instinct, Ren. I wasn’t thinking, and that could’ve gotten us both killed. That’s not the way you hunt a rattler. You have to be clever, and careful, and use your head so you don’t lose what’s left of yourself like an animal, but I just _—_ ”

“You saved our lives. Does it matter how?”

“It does to me! If I’m going to die out here _—_ and it’d be so easy to be dead if I acted like that all the time, just went on instinct and forgot everything else _—_ I want it to be as myself.”

Kylo Ren is scared to touch that. So he asks her for the thousandth time, a broken record, “And who are you?”

Her eyes skitter away. _Fuck_ , not again. “Someone who’s got work to do. Unless you’re planning on skinning the rattler and drying the meat?”

“Teach me.”

Maybe she’s just relieved that he’s dropped the question, but she nods without fighting his request. “Okay. First, tell me how much daylight’s left. If there’s enough time, we’ll dry the meat today. If not, we’ll wait to skin the snake until tomorrow. I don’t want the raw flesh smell attracting other things here if the meat’s going to be drying after dark.”

Rey sits up and roots through her bag to find her sharp stylus stone while Kylo crawls from the dugout. Standing a bare yard from the impale rattlesnake and trying not to look at the way advancing shadows seem to animate the crumpled body, he outlines his palm against the dun-colored horizon and counts his twenty-minute fingers. His hands shake slightly from the proximity. “About three hours until sundown,” he calls back to Rey, guessing that’s close to accurate. At least his voice is steady.

Would she laugh at him if she knew his fear? A cruel laugh, a scoff, not her friendly snort.

“Good enough,” she answers, emerging on hands and knees. She crouches at his side, fists on her hips, examining the snake. “I don’t suppose you snatched any of that blonde woman’s knives when you ran off with me? This would be easier with something sharper than a rock.”

“No...I wasn’t thinking.”

“Hmm.” It’s an unreadable noise.

Goddamnit, he could’ve brought so much more to this weird alliance _—_ actually been of some use to her _—_ if he’d just remembered to grab his pack with all the First Order’s confiscated weaponry. Which he left behind. Kylo blesses the day’s vicious heat for the time buffer it gives him between now, when she’s so close to not actively distrusting him, and when she inevitably witnesses the full extent of his fuck-up.

“If you want to do something useful,” Rey says, so topical that his ears redden, “drive the staff into the riverbed so it’s anchored upright. The snake’s dead. It’s not going to hurt you.”

Still, he avoids looking at the swaying, serpentine body while he picks up her staff and makes a pestle of its capped end, twisting down through the ground’s hard-packed layers until the head’s buried and the staff stands upright on its own.

“Now grab the snake’s tail and pull its spine straight.”

He tries to hide his shudder as the rattles hiss between his fingers.

Rey cuts him a patronizing look. “Keep the body taut.” She edges right up against him, so close their shoulders almost brush. Not quite. He forces himself not to lean toward her _—_ not when she’s brandishing her tapered stone right under his nose and narrating what she’s about to do.

“I’m going to insert this sharp end into the snake’s anal vent, then cut up along the body to the head. It’s going to be messy, so if you’re going to be sick, vomit that way.” She points over his shoulder with the rock, missing his nose by millimeters.

On purpose? He wouldn’t put it past her. Wondering distracts him until the first gout of black-red blood pitches into the air, splattering his hands. It’s warm.

“Sorry. That’s the worst part.”

Working in fits and starts, the snake’s tough hide resisting her and the lack of a knife’s cutting edge hindering her progress, Rey drags away scaly skin from the flesh beneath, pink and shimmering, cutting connective tissue with slashes from her stone as she goes. Then she jerks her staff from the ground, tugs the snake off it, and cuts off the rattler’s head.

“It’s over, Ren. You can look.”

“It’s just the sun, it was shining into my eyes _—_ ”

“I passed out the first time I did this,” she tells him.

Which makes him feel a little better. At least she’s not laughing. And she’s actually told him something about herself, freely.

Rey shows him how to pull the intestines from the snake’s body _—_ “They’re really nutritious, with a lot of moisture” _—_ and then they hack off lingering connective tissue from the meat. Rey stretches the rattler’s remains flat to dry in the sizzling afternoon sun above the riverbank.

“If something comes to try and steal the meat while it’s curing, we can kill and eat it, too,” she says.

Rey’s equal parts cautious and opportunistic, and it fascinates him to watch her work. It flat-out amazes him that she’s allowing it.

They keep watch over their curing jerky for the rest of the afternoon, testing it from time to time with a finger pushed against the flesh to judge its remaining moisture levels. Rey sucks on the snake’s intestines with determination, making a face at the taste but ready to extract all the water she can from the desert _—_ however she can. When she offers a piece to Kylo, he refuses and grabs a fistful of mud to start squeezing water from it. He’s not quite that ready. She shrugs and slurps on the innards herself.

“Disgusting,” she says around a mouthful, and it could be the sun twitching weird shadows in the dugout, or did she just _wink_ at him?

He ponders this into early evening, producing far more water than necessary, overflowing Rey’s canteen.

Sunset, and Rey slips past him to retrieve the jerky.

“Good,” she nods, holding up their prize, which has shrunk and darkened in the sun. Under this impossible heat, the meat has completely dried in a few hours. If they’d ventured out into the open before nightfall, they’d have ended up like the jerky, too. “This’ll last almost a week.”

“Enough time for the weather to break.”

“And for the First Order to come,” she says, following his train of thought.

“What are you planning to do?”

“What I’ve always done.” She shakes her head at him. “Run.”

This dugout, the riverbed, and the life in their shade that she’s eked out for herself on the edge of starvation and dehydration _—_ they’re all she has. If he hadn’t gone back to the First Order and told them about this place in a fit of hurt and anger, if he hadn’t run with her from the pond, she might still be safe here. But he went back, and then he ran, so she isn’t. Running isn’t safe anymore.

“You can’t outrun them. Not forever.” There’s a note of panic in his voice that’s new to him, and to her.

In the gathering dusk, Rey grows very still. Then she turns to him, gazing at him with something like compassion, the lingering colors of sunset reflecting in her irises. “I know.”

“So you need to be ready to fight. Rey, please. Please let me teach you to fight them.”

The otherworldly colors fade as she closes her eyes. She tilts her head back, face lifting into the first hints of night wind. Tendrils of hair sweat-plastered to her cheeks dry and curl in the stirring air. She inhales, deep and pure, peaceful and purposeful. Then _—_

“Okay.”

“Thank you, Rey, thank you _—_ ” He’s babbling in relief, that she’ll let him _—_

“But on one condition.”

 _Anything_ , his body weeps. His brain is very slightly smarter, and asks, “What condition?”

“It’ll be hand-to-hand combat, right? Because you know I won’t use a gun. So for every hit I score, you have to tell me something about Ben Solo.”

Ben _fucking_ Solo.

“That’s not fair, Rey.”

She hasn’t even opened her eyes, but her lips curl. Disappointment, or a smile? “That’s my condition.”

“Then I have a condition, too. For every hit you should be able to score and don’t, you tell me something about Rey from Takodana.”

Her eyes snap open. “No.”

“Then...tell me why you don’t like guns. If you’d just accept the necessity _—_ ”

“No. You’re asking the same thing.”

“Takodana and guns?”

She scowls at him for making the connection, crossing her arms, unprepared to compromise.

“Fine,” he says to her defensive posture, consciously unclenching his fists. He reminds himself to breathe, reminds himself of his endgame. _Rey lives. And so does he._ “Don’t tell me. But I’m going to teach you, anyway. Because I want you to survive this.”

“Because you’re feeling guilty.”

“Because I _—_ ” He stops himself in time to stop the words. But not in time to stop Rey from reading them in him.

Her lips part. She stares for a long moment; he can’t measure passing time with the pulse in his wrists, because his heart seems to have stopped. And then, finally _—_

“Okay,” she whispers again. “Okay.”

They eat and drink in silence, fueling their bodies for the ordeal to come, when they’ll step out of the riverbed under a cover of darkness to begin their onslaught against each other. Kylo removes the clip from his gun and leaves it between them on the dugout floor. He leads Rey up the bank and onto flat, open ground, the baked soil still warm beneath their feet. Only then does he break the quiet.

“They’re all larger than you are. Hux, Phasma, even Mitaka. But you’re quicker. If you can’t use your staff to strike while staying out of range _—_ and you won’t be able to, if they’ve got you covered with pistols _—_ you can leverage your agility against them.”

“I’m never going to let that disgusting man touch me.”

Kylo grins at her vitriol. “So you need to know how to disarm him before he can. I’m going to try not to hurt you while we do this, but I’m a lot stronger and bigger than you are, and your shoulder’s still recovering, so _—_ ”

“You’ll be accurate practice.”

 _That’s the spirit_. But _—_

“None of this is safe,” he warns her. “If your opponent has a loaded weapon drawn on you, there’s no non-dangerous way to _—_ ”

Rey rolls her eyes. “Quit stalling and show me what to do.”

Using his own left hand to stand in as hers for the moment, Kylo shows Rey how to grab the hand holding his weapon around his extended wrist, twisting the gun away from her chest and jerking it up so that a finger pressing down on the trigger will send any bullets exploding into the air instead of through her body.

“Try it, slowly.”

Rey flexes her fingers. “Okay.” But she doesn’t move, rigid before him, eyes fixed on the unloaded gun.

“It’s okay to be scared,” he tells her, voice low and whisper-soft. “But that’s why we have to _—_ ”

She rushes him all at once, mouth twisted with a soundless scream. He barely levers aside in time, stunned at her speed.

“Slowly, Rey, you need to take this slowly, or you’re going to hurt yourself _—_ ”

She skids to a stop behind him, chest heaving, eyes wild and glittering. “ _I don’t care_.” And then she lunges back again, hands extended, fingers reaching for the gun or his throat.

“Bang,” he says.

She stops dead. Her eyes flicker down to her chest, like he’s actually shot her.

Like he ever could.

“Rey, I _—_ ” He wants to snatch her up and hold her against him, find where she’s hurting. Make it stop. _Maybe this is a terrible idea_. But he doesn’t, because she’d hate him for it.

At least she’s still breathing _—_ deep, winded gasps that seem to wring her body apart with each exhale. “Sorry, sorry, I’m sorry,” she mumbles between breaths. “I just...need a minute _—_ ”

So he waits, more patient with her than he’s ever been with himself, as Kylo Ren or as Ben Solo. And it feels right.

“I was afraid of guns when I joined the military,” he tells her. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. I was younger than you, and I was fucking terrified. I was angry all the time, but I didn’t want to kill anyone.”

“Then why become a soldier?”

“A Marine,” he corrects her, just to see her flash of annoyance. It’s delayed, but it comes. _Good_.

“Then why become a _Marine_?” Rey snaps her teeth around the word.

“Because my parents were scared. They thought I needed to be isolated, trained to ignore myself and to obey others. For everyone’s safety.”

“Why?”

“There’s a sort of...insanity in my family. On my mother’s side. My grandfather killed my grandmother. He tried to kill my uncle and my mother. He was...charming.”

“Ha!”

“No, I mean it. He could be really charming. Funny, and sarcastic, and just really, really smart. Thought he was smarter than everyone else, and that eventually made him lonely. And angry.”

Rey tilts her head, considering him. Her breathing is easier, eyes roving from the gun to his face. “Not at all like someone I know _—_ ”

“That’s what my parents thought they saw,” he says, fighting to keep his voice even, hardly able to bear hearing those terrible words from her. “So they...sent me away. But it wasn’t any better, away from them in Venezuela and all the other terrible bush I got sent to. General Snoke gave me an option to send _them_ away _—_ the people who died when I couldn’t lead them because I was too deep in my own head, in my own darkness. And my parents. What they’d done to me in sending me off, alone and scared _—_ I could forget. What they’d made me do. Made me a killer. I could forget them. Forget Ben Solo, when that’s what everyone always wanted. So I destroyed him _—_ ”

“You didn’t.” Suddenly Rey swings into motion, her right hand coming up to fasten on his wrist, twisting the gun away from her body, his finger on the trigger sending an imaginary bullet into the star-strewn sky.

“I did!” he shouts out the pain of her fingers digging into his skin. _I did, I promise—_

“No. He’s right here, fighting you _—_ ”

“You don’t know what you’re _—_ ”

“You’re scared. If Ben Solo comes back, if he eclipses Kylo Ren, what’s the point of everything you’ve suffered? All the things you’ve done. That’s what you’re thinking, right?” Rey sinks her nails into his wrist, glaring and beautiful and terrible, and all at once he hates her _—_ “What’s the point of all that’s been done to you?”

He throws her off and she lands hard on her heels, refusing to fall, and it’s so fucking infuriating that after everything he’s told her, stripping himself bare against his orders and his iron training to _help_ her, _this_ is how she reacts to him _—_

“You want to fight dirty?” he growls, launching himself forward and grabbing her shoulders, twisting her so that she’s pinned against his chest, his arm around her throat. “With nails and teeth? You want to get yourself killed because you weren’t paying attention when I tried to save your goddamn life? _Fine!_ ”

“ _Fuck_ you! I swore if you ever laid a hand on me again, I’d _—_ ”

“Just _try_ it,” he snarls against her ear, swinging his pistol around to her temple.

Rey stops struggling. Her hands drop to her sides, leaving claw marks from her nails etched into his forearm. Barely breathing. And then _—_

“This was how he held her,” she chokes. “The way he held her when they both died. _Why don’t you put the clip back in your damn pistol, Ren, and finish what I should’ve done four thousand, two hundred and fifty-five days ago?!_ ”

“What?”

Just too late, he realizes that she’s been distracting him with her gasping tears, her limp hands, with the confession he’s wanted to hear from her for so, so long. Her fingers find the hem of his shirt and jerk it up while she hauls her body weight against his arm, throwing him off his balance for a crucial second, bowing him forward so that the shirt peels up over his ribs, over his shoulders, blanketing his head.

Blinded, he struggles against the fabric while Rey twists like an eel, ploughing an elbow into his exposed stomach, dropping him onto his knees. The heel of her boot connects with his wrist, sending the gun spinning out of his grip, and then she’s behind him, leaping onto his back, hands fastening around his neck, pressing, pressing, pressing. Even though he’s freed himself from his blindfolding shirt, he can’t see _—_ sparks explode in front of his eyes as Rey throttles away the oxygen supply from his brain.

“This is what I should’ve done to the bastard,” she grunts. “But I had a gun, and I felt powerful.” She tightens her grip. The hands with which he’s been reaching over his head to grab her fall, muscles weakening as even the fireworks in his eyes begin to fade.

“He was holding Paige with a pistol shoved in her ear, because I’d started to bleed and I wouldn’t spread my legs on the mattress for him when it was my turn, my turn in that house with the filthy green wallpaper the State let him call a children’s home, a _home school_ , and if I’d thought for a second, maybe I could’ve figured out a way to save all of us from him, but Rose was screaming and I panicked because I loved them, my friends, my sisters in every way that mattered, and I was holding a gun I never should’ve had, and I aimed for the arm he was holding across her throat, and I shot him, and I shot her in the neck, too, and the bullet went straight through her, into him again, and they both fucking _died_.”

The green room. Takodana. _Hell_ , and Kylo finally, finally understands.

 _Rey_ , he tries to gasp, but he doesn’t have any breath left in his lungs; her fingers are forged of steel _—_ she’s going to kill him, and he can’t stop it _—_

“I reached for Rose, to run, we had to run, but she was just screaming and screaming for Paige, her _real_ sister, I didn’t matter, I’d killed her trying to save us, and she grabbed the gun from me, and there were sirens coming, and she wouldn’t stop screaming, and I ran, and that’s when I heard the second gunshot, and I knew…

“The world ended for me, that day. It just took longer for everyone else to realize it.”

She releases him.

Kylo’s hardly conscious of falling. There’s a buzzing darkness in his brain where thoughts should be...swallowing Kylo Ren and the struggling remnants of Ben Solo...swallowing the voice in his mind, which howls punishments as it dims...and maybe it would be better to just...submit.

He thrashes within his own head for an eternity, for a single breath, caught between the descent into nothing and rising back to consciousness and pain. His heart continues to pulse, and he almost wishes it would stop, because it hurts too much, he’s being torn apart _—_

But then something lands on his exposed back. _A finger_ , his body tells him, since his mind is deep in the coils of some nameless, fathomless struggle...A finger: scuffed and scarred and callused. It traces the width of his shoulders, along some invisible line.

A scar. _Sergeant Ben Solo is dead_.

 _Why didn’t she kill him?_ , because Rey is drawing the scars upon his body where he’d beaten Ben Solo out of his skin, and she’s whispering with her voice like water, like desert wind, like life when he only wants to die as he’s always been supposed to...

 _Ben. Ben, I’m sorry_. _Please come back._

 _Pleading_. Rey is pleading with him. Crying, her tears falling against his disfigured skin. Blessing. Absolution. Healing. Rain. Her sobs are thunder, her screams are the flashing, forked lightning _—_

No, that’s true lightning. Real thunder rolling overhead, rumbling in his chest. Rain _—_ the storm is breaking all around them. His mind is broken, too. And clear.

 _Rey_.

She’s here. Beside him. On her knees, head reared back to the storm-torn sky in fierce despair at what she’s done to them both, her face streaming with the torrents and tears until they’re indistinguishable on her cheeks.

 _Rey_ , he calls again to her.

Somehow, though he’s not spoken with words, through the lightning and the thunder and her keening, she hears him. He raises a hand, a question as she turns to him where he lies, bruised and battered and grateful for all that she’s done. All that she is.

She ignores his hand.

Rey answers with her mouth on his.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All I can say is EEEEEEEEEEEEEE HERE WE GO!
> 
> If you're enjoying Sun, Sand, and Stone, tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It only took 17 chapters to get here...behold, our adorable idiots quench their thirst!

She’s killed him.

She knows it.

It’s what she _does_. No matter how much she tries to stop herself, anyone she lets close to her ends up dead. She’s let herself think, _dared_ to think...today and last night...maybe it could be different with the man sprawled beside her, barely breathing if he’s breathing at all. That maybe they could understand each other, that maybe they were the same.

But it was her hands around his throat, no gun at all, just Rey in her desperation to cling to him and to push him away, to leave her alone _—_ where she needs to be, where she has to be, where she hates to be.

And then he calls her. Wordless, soundless, an echo in all the cavities of her body. Thunder.

 _Rey_.

Her name is a question when she wants it to be a scream, a groan. Life, flowing from his lips. Rain.

He’s alive. Whoever he is beneath the scars under her fingers, he’s alive.

She’s forced him to the edge of his death, and he’s clawed his way back to her.

Whoever he is, she claims him. _Hers_.

The hand he raises isn’t enough, has never been enough for her. She’s hated his touch when she wants _so. much. more._ from him. She wants everything, and she lets herself want it.

Rey pushes herself over the precipice, from her safety and solitude, and falls not on the desert ground but upon him, claiming him and her own life with her mouth.

 _Fuck_ , she’s stunned or killed him all over again, because he isn’t moving, still beneath her while she ravages him, biting him, demanding _—_ but then his arms reach up around her and he hauls her down across his chest, pressing himself against her with a desperate, aching need that rivals her own. Nothing sweet, nothing tender, just raw, blind panic to mark, to claim, to sate and take.

She sinks her teeth into his lower lip and he growls, tangling his hands in her sopping hair where she’s draped twisting and squirming across him, pressing all of her body against the length of his in starved desperation for touch. He opens her mouth with a flick of his tongue, swallowing her gasp. She fastens her lips against his, devouring his breath in her mouth, licking, biting, and curses low in her throat when he breaks away, pinning her beneath him on the ground rapidly turning to mud. Her curses become a gasp and a cry when his teeth nip against the pulse point under her ear.

It hurts. She glories in it.

“ _Rey, Rey, Rey_ ,” he’s murmuring hard, scorching kisses down her neck, across exposed skin where their fighting has tugged her tunic off her shoulder.

She grabs the nape of his neck, fisting her hands in his wet hair as she’s ached to do, arching against him, but he resists, bracing himself above her to bite at the wrist she’s raised, a bruise blossoming on the tender skin inside her arm. It’s too much, it’s not enough, and she’s angry at the space between them, kicking her legs free from their tangle under his and clutching him around his naked waist with hooked ankles, dragging his hips down to hers.

And oh god, she wants him right here on the ground, the rain and his mouth awakening something that flowers and quakes inside her, and with his body responding to the heat between her legs, she knows he wants it, too—Rey shoves at his shoulder and he topples sideways, off his balance from keeping a grip on her twisting wrist to kiss and bruise over and over again. She rolls with him, straddling his hips, forcing her palms down on his shoulders to hold him where she wants him. There, _there_. He stares up at her, lips parted, pupils black and reflecting strikes of distant lightning, stunned or appalled by her audacity. She doesn’t care. Rey grinds down on his shaft, outlined in perfect, mouth-watering detail through his soaked waistband. Sparks ignite low in her belly, at the apex of her thighs where she punishes them both with agonizing friction—

But when she reaches for the buttons and zippers to free him and draw him into her, hips canting with anticipation, Ben grabs her hand. “Rey, wait. I don’t want—”

“Yes, you do.” She almost screams in frustration when he holds her steady, panting above him, half-mad with wanting. “And I want you to fuck me, Ben. Please, _please!_ ”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, goddamnit!” Rey snatches up his other hand and presses his thumb to the blossoming bundle of nerves at the northernmost point of her sex. She circles against him, whimpering, and his breath catches.

“I...I don’t want to hurt you.”

“I’ve never let you. Please, Ben.”

“I’m not B—”

“Shut up and fuck me, then!”

He swallows with gratifying difficulty. His thumb swirls against the nub of her arousal. “I want to. God, I want to. But what if you—”

“I haven’t bled in three years. Don’t worry. I’d never burden you with a—”

“That’s not what I...I wasn’t thinking that, Rey. I swear to god. But we...we need to...after what happened in Takodana...you need to tell me if I do something that you don’t—”

“I’ll break your jaw if you do. Happy?” she demands, furious and throbbing with need.

“No, I want you to tell me!”

“ _Fine!_ ”

“Just...just hold still for a minute. I can’t think when you’re doing that _—_ ” His words cut off in a moan as Rey rakes her nails down his scarred, beautiful chest. _Hers_. “Oh _fuck_ , Rey _—_ Please, I can’t...just...” He grips her hips and lifts her off his stomach where she’s pressing down desperately against him, depositing her in the mud at his side while rain pours against their half-naked bodies.

Holding his gaze, Rey rips off her shirt.

He grows very still.

Then, seemingly against his will, he reaches out to stroke the bared curve of her breast, the pad of his thumb _—_ hot with her arousal _—_ cresting over her beading nipple. Rey gasps, clutching his hand, pressing into his palm. She drags her other hand down beneath her own waistband, fingers curling against herself, against the rose between her thighs, keening in delicious misery.

“Shhh…” he whispers. He rises to his knees and draws the curve of her spine in against him, bowing her kneeling figure over his supporting arm while his fingers fist in her hair and arch her neck back, bending low to trace his lips and the warm tip of his tongue over her small, dusky breasts. She bucks in his arms, clutching him with frantic, ripping nails, crying out when his teeth fasten around a nipple and _twist_ , thrashing in her pleasure. He releases her immediately. “Is that _—_ ”

“No, it’s okay, it’s okay, please don’t stop _—_ ”

Instead of dipping down his mouth again _—oh, that mouth, she wants it_ everywhere _—_ he sinks onto the ground again and arranges her in his lap so that her hips align with his and her heels can catch behind his waist. He picks up her discarded tunic while she clings to him, clumsily kissing every inch of his rain-slicked skin, tearing against his ribcage with hungry fingers. Though his length burns hard against her, he remains focused on his task, only his trembling lips betraying him, crimson with her biting kisses. He wrings muddy water from her shirt until the seeping droplets fall clean and clear in the darkness, and then he smoothes the cloth over Rey’s back and shoulders.

Washing her, gentle and insistent.

He strokes down her spine. She shivers, collapsing forward on his chest with her face buried against his neck at how _good_ it feels _—_ she doesn’t deserve it, but he doesn’t stop _—_ every place he touches growing warm and glowing through sheets of falling water. He washes her clavicles, under her arms, the curves and peaks of her breasts, and she shudders, rocking into him. He rubs the fabric behind her ears and sucks on her earlobes. She chokes and cries.

“Good?”

“I _—_ yes, it’s _—yes—_ ”

He smoothes the cloth over her ribs, standing out thin and strong like spars, barely containing her bursting heart, dipping lower to her navel, to the edge of her waistband. He raises his head, holding her gaze. Asking her. _Are you sure?_

 _Yes_.

Awkwardly crushed against him, refusing to release her hold on his body, Rey helps him drag the pants off her hips, down her legs, kicking the sodden fabric and her boots off her ankles. It requires some contortions, but she braces herself on his shoulders, tenacious and flexible, and then she’s bared. Totally naked and sprawled across his lap, rain and arousal slicking her thighs.

He swallows, a hard clutch in his throat at the sight.

“Now you,” she demands, reaching for his zipper.

“Not yet. Let me…” He lifts her, rising with her onto her feet so they’re standing chest to chest, the peaks of her breasts just brushing his ribcage. And then he immediately drops to his knees again, pressing his forehead against her stomach, lips barely whispering over her skin. Rey seizes his hair and _pulls_ , drawing him closer, desperate for his mouth. He nips her, and she quakes. While his hands and the cloth make gentle explorations along her calves, her thighs, the grimy backs of her knees, ministering to her with an acolyte’s devotion, he bites her stomach. Pleasure from his hands and pain from his teeth mingle under she can’t separate their threads, and she just trembles and cries, holding him hard to keep herself upright, shaking as fabric glides up her inner thigh, stroking, circling, friction burning into her.

 _Please_.

He washes her sex, cloth slipping between her moist folds. She screams at the contact, shooting heat driving straight from her core to her tongue and exploding there.

“Good?”

She can’t even answer him with words, head arched back and howling _—_ she’s a wolf and he’s the moon, her only moon, and she’s crying for him _—_ and then his fingers replace the fabric, kneading, spreading, dipping into her body with a twist and a curl that makes her bear down on him, gasping, panting, bucking her hips, urging him deeper, enveloping him and wanting more, _more_ while he strokes a tiny, rough patch of nerves far inside her, a secret she’s not even known within herself, birthing stars _—_

She’s rising, deep muscles in her abdomen spasming, fingers and toes cracking with tension, urgent and angry when he suddenly slows, denying her release _—_ she looks down to find his eyes on her face, and his smile is wicked in the night.

“Don’t you _—_ ”

His fingers slip out of her. He grins, sliding them between his lips. Savoring her. He leans in to brush his mouth against the sweet bud above her sex, once, so lightly, and then he withdraws.

She slams a fist down on his shoulder in desperation. “ _Fuck_ you _—_ ”

“Yes, you will.” A threat and a promise that makes her shiver with rage and wanting. “Oh, you will.” He unknots her hands from his hair. Wet strands fall over his forehead to skim her sensitive stomach _—_ she gasps and curses _—_ while he unlaces his boots. He peels off his socks, bracing a broad hand against her for balance, just too high on her body from where she wants him with pleasure and violence. Then, straightening to his full height, he finally lowers his zipper.

Rey rushes him, seizing his hips and hauling the soaked fabric down to his ankles in one frantic yank. He steps free and back, just out of reach while he wrings out her discarded tunic again and uses it to wash himself as he’s washed her. Muddy water cascades in sheets off his shoulders.

Though she wants nothing more than to follow him, to leap onto him with her legs hooked over his waist again, catching his hardness against her belly and grinding down on him there, Rey remains on her knees. She devours the majesty of his naked body with her eyes, ravenous with desire to touch the proud ridge of his cock, the constellation of freckles dusting his pelvis and peeking through curls of dark pubic hair. She wants to suck bruises on his thighs, take the bones of his ankles between her teeth and _bite_. She wants to taste the lines of scars arching across his pale, sun-peeling skin, swirl her tongue against a circular burn on his shoulder, through a fresh gouge along his upper arm. But she knows, deep in her coiling core, that the sight of her on her knees, watching him with dilated eyes and parted lips _—_ she licks her lower lip slowly, moaning, and his cock shudders _—_ tantalizes him far more than if she attacks him with mouth and tongue and grasping hands.

She wants to make him suffer for what he hasn’t finished, for the ache he’s awakened in her and left unsated.

So Rey dips a finger into her own sex, whimpering against the pressure of her thumb, and then she sucks her finger into her mouth.

He drops her tunic and seizes her in an instant, hauling her up against him, crushing her mouth, groaning at the taste of her on Rey’s own lips.

“Fuck me. Now,” she whispers into his mouth, reaching up onto her toes so that the wet heat between her legs glides along his cock. “Right here.”

He chokes. “I...I don’t want...I don’t want to take you in the dirt, like an animal, but _fuck_ , Rey, you’re not making it easy _—_ ”

“I don’t want it to be easy. I want you to make me feel, and hurt, and _—_ ”

 _Show me why I’m still alive_.

But she doesn’t get the words out, the confession, because he lifts her and strides back to the riverbed. He leaps down into it with a splash, and she shrieks at the jolt of vertigo in her stomach, grabbing him again too hard with adrenaline and desire.

“You’ve got a grip like a steel trap,” he pants. But he’s grinning, and one of his fingers cradling her bottom strokes between her thighs where she’s tight and wet. Innuendo and _—oh_ fuck _, yes._

Ducking his ridiculous height into the dugout _—_ a very distant part of Rey’s mind congratulates itself for delving into the riverbank several feet above the bed, to foil snakes and rushing water surging down the channel _—_ he deposits her on his sleeping bag with a punishing thump. Disoriented and winded, Rey gasps for breath, still for a moment. He must’ve done this on purpose, the bastard, because when she can breathe again, he’s spread her thighs and settled between them, gigantic, torturing hands pressing her knees outward to hold her in place.

“What’s the point of surviving if the only way you know you’re still alive is that you can still feel pain?” he asks her, almost rhetorically. “I don’t want to hurt you, Rey. I want to make you feel _good_.”

That’s not something she merits, because she was a bad girl and she’s an even worse woman, she knows it, _she knows it_ , that’s what _he_ always said, pushing her down in that room with the peeling green wallpaper and exposed laths over the mattress where she’d tried to claw her way through the wall _—_ violence is the only way she knows _—_ but then he _—the man here, now—_ places his mouth on her and she forgets her own damn name.

Rey’s protest becomes a stuttering little moan that’s insanely embarrassing, because she sounds like a half-drowned kitten or a _—a—_ but her brain is closed for business and her body’s open, and the sounds she exhales make him hum against her sex. That’s worse than before because _good_ isn’t how she’s supposed to feel, and this is so, so good, good, good _—_

His tongue tracing her sweet little nub, licking the patterns of a rose against her peaked flesh.

His right hand slipping up her thigh while his left palm kneads a fierce massage _—_ higher, and into her all at once, two fingers stroking her from the inside out, brushing those secret nerves so that she bucks against his lips.

“Good, Rey?” Breath fanning her overheated core, tickling, teasing.

Rushing water, rushing blood in her ears, spine bowing.

“Tell me.” Fingers curling, urging sounds from her throat that aren’t words, she can’t remember words, any words, just him, just _this—_

“Say it, Rey. I want to hear you say it.”

She can’t, _she can’t_ , she’s on the verge of shattering, she’s wailing with frustration that he won’t let her, let her _—_

“Tell me that you feel good, Rey.” His voice cracks, straining, but he resists her fingers forcing his head down between her thighs again, licking her arousal on his lips and holding her gaze, drinking in her heaving breasts, her fury, the flush of her skin glowing bright in the darkness. “Tell me that I make you feel good. _Say it_.”

“You _—_ you _—_ ” She’s sobbing, clutching him, body quivering on the very edge of her release, if he’d only just _—_

“All of it. _Say all of it_.”

“M-make _—_ make me _—feel—_ ”

He groans and leaves a mark of his teeth on her inner thigh, so close _—_ “How do I make you feel?”

“ _Please—_ ”

“Tell me what you want, Rey.”

“F-f-feel _—_ ”

“ _How?_ ”

She blesses-curses-hates-him-wants-him. “ _Good_.”

“ _Yes_.”

His tongue dips into her core, replacing his fingers, warm and strong and flexible, his slick thumb presses her hardened, throbbing nub, swirling, the flick of a fingernail, half pain, half unbearable bliss _—_ his tongue curls inside her _—_ and he licks her over the edge.

He swallows her pleasure as Rey shatters around his tongue, keening and quaking while the climax rips through her, clinging to him. He works her through the aftershocks with his mouth soft on her sex, gentle upon her over-sensitive flesh. Only when she’s quiet, panting, utterly sapped and splayed shamelessly before him, does he withdraw. She whimpers, missing him immediately.

“It can feel good,” he whispers against her stomach, laying a kiss on the quivering muscles there. Perfect and almost tender, with the urgent press of his cock against her thigh still unsated. “Being alive.”

“When…” she tries to speak. The ability to form words comes slowly back to her. She strokes her fingers through his hair, tugging up his head. “When did you figure that out?”

“Just now.”

“You haven’t even fucked me yet...” Her body’s limp and warm. She frowns at him, a little sleepy, a little guilty at the insistent pressure of his shaft when she’s wholly spent.

“I will,” he promises with a hint of that sinful smile. Her pulse gives a tiny, exhausted hop, but then her eyelids flutter down. “We have time.”

Rey tries to tell him that _no, no we don’t, there’s never enough time, there’s never any time but this moment, now, we could be dead tomorrow_ , but he’s crawling up beside her, tucking her boneless body into the sleeping back and sliding in after, zipping them into fleece-lined warmth and each other, seemingly unbothered by his own body’s pressing need. He folds her into his arms, strokes sweat- and rain-soaked hair off her neck, and she sleeps.

She doesn’t dream.

Her mind is blank. Peaceful.

When she wakes, she knows exactly where she is.

_With him all around her, his arms holding her close against his radiator chest, one of his legs sprawled over hers, asleep and hard against her bottom._

And what she wants.

Carefully, so careful not to wake him, Rey turns in Ben’s arms _—yes, Ben—_ until they’re face to face, close enough to kiss. She wants to taste his lips again, feel his tongue sweep over hers, exploring her mouth. So she gives herself half the satisfaction she wants, the lightest possible touch of her lips to his. A butterfly kiss.

He moans, not waking; Rey’s ears catch the low sound even through the pattering downpour outside the dugout. He settles back into the fleece and her spreading hair, rubbing his cheek against it.

 _Good_. Because she’s going to do to him what he’s done to her _—_ startle him into a sudden keening with pleasure. Unexpected, no time to prepare, no time to think, just...imploding among the stars behind his eyelids.

Rey skims a finger down her belly, finding the point of pure sensation between her legs. She begins to work her thumb over the sweet little hill as he’d done, alternating pressure and direction, tracing out a labyrinth while her stomach tightens and heat blossoms under her hand. Barely a minute later, she’s slick and hot and aching with his breath fanning her closed eyes, but she doesn’t dip her fingers into her core, doesn’t bring herself to a silent, shuddering release in his arms, all unknowing and deep in dreams.

No.

Instead, she nuzzles closer against him as though she’s also asleep, and he responds to the pressure of her head on his shoulder by obligingly rolling onto his back, pulling her with him across his chest.

 _Perfect_.

Inch by precious inch, her leg creeps over his, hips twisting until she’s straddling him inside their thermal sleeve. His erection pulses against her stomach. She eases herself forward, crawling up his body, the peaks of her breasts grazing his skin, until the entrance to her sex is poised at his cock’s head, the fluid beading there mingling with the evidence of Rey’s own arousal on her thighs.

And then she presses her hips back while hovering her face just above his; she wants to witness the exact moment when he realizes what’s happening, what she’s doing to him, wants to see his pupils blow black even in the darkness, opening for her _._ Her body parts around him, for him, sheathing Ben Solo inside her with warmth and wetness. Slowly, so slowly, working herself through the sensations as much as him.

It hurts a little, because she’s always associated this act with fear, with pain, and her muscles spasm. Unsure, resisting.

But this is Ben, and she wants him here. She chooses to take him into her core.

 _Her choice_.

Her walls flutter and soften, and he slips fully inside her, a tiny gasp floating down from her mouth to his, their hips flush together, pieces of a puzzle aligning.

Finally, she wakes him. “ _Ben_.”

“Rey...” A groan, uncomprehending, half-dreaming. No, she wants him conscious. She wants him to _know_. She wants him to feel _everything_. Rey swivels her hips down and Ben’s eyes flick open, straight into hers.

“Rey _—_ ” Her name again, but cracking over his tongue, voice breaking as he visibly realizes he’s hilted inside her. She cants her pelvis, easing against him with a hum in her throat. His cock gives a shuddering lurch within her; she feels it in her chest, in her curled toes. “You _—_ ” His fingers fly up to grip her thighs clasped on either side of his hips, trying to hold her still while he catches up with the situation _—_ but guiding her, too, rolling her over him again.

 _This is how it feels to have your body rebel, Ben. This—_ Rey clenches muscles deep within her abdomen, tightening around the head of his cock with a brutal, lovely strength that wrings a strangled cry from him, his hips bucking up against hers in desperate need _—is how it feels_.

“You promised to fuck me,” she tells him, panting at the dig of his fingers against her skin, the bruises that she wants, undulating so that he slides half out of her, then slamming back down onto him, taking him fully again. He chokes. Rey leans over him, resting her elbows on his shoulders and threading her fingers into his hair, tightening her grip to the point of pain, holding his lust-blackened eyes. “So fuck me.”

She rises again, threatening him _—_ and his hands blur from her hips to the small of her back, cradling her even as he violently flips their positions into reverse, so that she’s pinned beneath him with her calves hooked around his thighs and he’s looming over her, all shadow and wild desire. He braces his elbows on either side of her head, their foreheads almost touching, and then sheaths his cock inside her again without warning, a sudden groaning heave that thrusts her backwards, sliding on the fleece lining. Rey gasps against his mouth, wet heat spilling between her legs, melting her around his erection.

“Yes,” he rasps against her lips, driving himself into her hard, again, again. “I promised to fuck you. And Rey, do you know what I’m going to do now?”

Desire makes her giddy, and she actually giggles, which becomes a mewling little shriek as he gathers her hips higher with an arm sweeping beneath her back and his cock angles to hit that sweet, rough place while his pelvis grinds circles on hers, warming her nub.

“You-you,” she stutters, her voice pitched high and keening, bubbling with the effervescent greed rising through her blood, reddening her cheeks, her lips, heightening her sensitivity, her delicate rose flushing. “You’re going to fuck me like you promised?”

“Is that what you want? Do you want me to keep my promise? Do you like it when I keep my promises to you, Rey?”

“Y-yes _—_ ”

“Have I ever not kept a promise to you?”

“No _—_ ”

“Then I’m going to make you another promise, and then I’m going to make you come, Rey.”

She can only answer him with a bleating cry of pleasure as he rocks her closer, _closer—_

“I’m going to make sure that no one ever hurts your again. I’m going to make sure _—_ ”

Tears stain her flushed cheeks, dripping from the corners of her eyes screwed up with _so close, so c-close—_ “Y-you can’t promise that, you c-can’t know _—_ ”

“I _am_ promising that to you, Rey.” He swoops down on her mouth, clasping her lower lip with his teeth, urging her hips up, up, up. “ _Now come for me_ ,” he growls over her tongue, and he _bites_.

Rey is a star, a supernova flaming into existence and out of it in a single moment, a seastar coming loose from her moorings on the rocks and tumbling through a roaring tide. She feels everything. She is everything.

Ben follows her _—his promise—_ crying out her name as his seed spills in a hot gush inside her, shivers wracking his body, spasms jerking him this way and that where their bodies join, between Rey’s hands, over her tongue. It lasts forever, his peak, and it feels like home. And when his climax dims, he slides out of her with a groan and a devout curse, and they just hold each other for a while, gasping each other’s gasps, quivering in exhaustion, in gratitude, Ben cradling Rey across his chest out of their damp patch on the fleece.

 _A bastard and a gentleman, too_ , she thinks, smiling through the tired haze in her body, her brain. _Good_.

They sleep again, lightly, while the thunder softens and the rush of water fades from the river.

Broken.

Whole.

The sun wakes them. Daylight. The air outside their sleeping bag is cool on Rey’s cheek, the one not resting on Ben’s chest. She enjoys the contrast for a moment, limp and comfortable.

And then she remembers.

The storm’s broken and blown away the shimmering heat wave that was their safety...They can’t stay here. The First Order will be coming for them, for both of them; maybe they already are, with Rey sleeping the morning away like a damn princess in a fairytale.

She unfolds Ben’s arms from around her waist and slithers out of the sleeping bag, trying not to wake him sooner than she has to. The air inside the dugout puckers her nipples and pinches gooseflesh over her thighs. Where are her clothes?

Outside on the desert floor, where she’d dropped them in the rain. Her cheeks heat, and she steals a glance back at him, at his chest where she’d slept, at his unhandsome features softened in slumber so that he’s beautiful.

He’s beautiful, and she...she’s a scavenger, a scrappy little survivor who took what he offered her because she was selfish.

She can’t help seeing it now, in the daylight. She doesn’t want to, but _—_

He’d wanted to prove to her that staying alive was good, because he needs her to survive. If she dies at the First Order’s hands, he’ll die, too _—_ either from violence or starvation. So he’d made her feel, and she...she’d taken things, sensations from him when she shouldn’t have. She’d called him _Ben_ , after he’d denied that name. Pretending to have him when she knows she can’t. Pretending to have everything. But her life isn’t like last night, a reprieve from the harsh, unforgiving world.

From the truth of who they both are.

He’s not Ben, she’s just a scavenger, and nothing feels good.

Scrunching her mouth against the luxury of abrupt, devastating tears _—conserve_ , she shouts at herself when she wants to sob like a child, like the little girl she'd been. She blinks hard;  _the respite’s over—_ Rey steps out into the riverbed in a crouch, scanning the horizon _._ Empty. The channel’s already dry beneath her bare feet. She braces her palms against the top of the riverbank, preparing to haul herself up, when _—_

“Rey?” His voice, sleepy and familiar.

She wishes she were wearing her shirt at least, because she feels suddenly, terribly exposed before him in the sunlight, in the day. And ashamed. Yes, he’d made her forget for a while, forget who she is, who he is, why they’ve been forced together...but _a while_ is over.

She forces herself not to turn around, not to betray herself to him with weakness. “I’ll throw down your clothes. They should be pretty clean, at least.” Rey hops up out of the channel and collects their garments strewn across the ground. She dresses out in the open, trying not to see the passionate bruises flowering on her body from his mouth, his fingers, his teeth, then returns with a face as blank as she can make it to hand B _—Ren’s—_ clothes to him.

He reaches for his shirt and pants, and his fingers brush against hers. Rey jerks back, shaking the contact off her skin. _This is now_. She doesn’t glance up, to see either his hurt or his indifference. Or her bruises ringing his throat. She can stomach uncooked rattler intestines, but she can’t stomach this.

“They’ll be coming soon, if they aren’t already,” she says, not looking at him. Rey ducks into the dugout to retrieve her satchel. Head down, she fumbles through it for her marking stone and counts off another day, her stylus clumsy under Ren’s silence. “We need to move.”

 _We_. Not a good word. She has to stop using it.

“Rey…” Soft. Confused.

She shakes her head down at her stone. _Four thousand, two hundred fifty-six_. She just...can’t. She can’t pretend, and it’s cruel of him to pretend to her anymore, too.

She feels the moment when her rejection registers for him. The stiffness of his body behind her, the step back that he takes as if from an unseen blow to the gut. Or just back into the shade. _This is now_ , she repeats to herself, shivering when he draws a breath, half-afraid, half-hoping that he’ll say something that’ll mean it wasn’t all just to survive, but _—_

“What’s your plan?” Cold, tactical, practical. Hard syllables.

“Run,” she answers him, forcing an equal coldness into her voice when she wants to cry. “On the quad. Get as far away from here as I can.”

“That’s it? That’s the only option you’ve come up with?”

“Have you got a better idea?”

“Fight.”

 _Rain. Hands. Lips_.

“No.”

“Then we might as well just die here.”

 _There is no_ we. _We_ is for thunder and maybe for flickering, fragile happiness. Broken. For Ben. And Finn for a little while, in a different way.

Finn...

Poe Dameron.

A solar-powered car and Gatling guns.

The stones fall from between Rey’s fingers, striking against each other with a dull, chalky sound as they hit the dugout floor. It’s...an insane idea. Completely, utterly mad. Thirst-mad, mirage-mad. But it’s an option she hates less than her other ones. And it’s a distraction.

“What?” Ren asks her, reading her with his easy way, maybe forgetting for a moment that they’re pretending last night never happened _—she’s_ forgetting, forgetting the goodness and her shame _—_ pretending that they don’t know each other so intimately that they sometimes breathe together without meaning to, like now _—_

“I-I...have a different idea,” she stammers. She makes herself continue. “If I told you, you wouldn’t like it.”

“I’ll probably hate it,” he agrees. “What is it?”

Rey turns to him, peering up at his ridiculous height from inside the dugout with an excuse for her frown and over-bright eyes in the sun beating cool, watery colors across the riverbed. “When I left last time, with Finn, we met a man on the road. Poe Dameron. He calls himself a pilot. He has a car, or did a couple days ago _—_ solar-powered and retrofitted with these old machine guns under the hood and reinforced steel plates on the doors. Finn and I stayed with him for a night, before _—_ ”

“You stole Finn’s quad and came back to the dugout.” _To me_ , he doesn’t say, _when I was already gone_.

Rey ignores the echo between them, because what else can she do? No _—_ there’s no echo. Just her only longing. “With a car like that, the First Order wouldn’t even matter.”

“Are you planning to steal it like you stole the quad?” Ren thumbs the butt of his pistol in its holster, stroking the metal while he thinks.

Rey swallows and looks away, hating him and her warming thighs. “No. Not steal. But allying with Poe and Finn _—_ if they’re still traveling together, and they probably are _—_ would help both of us get out of the First Order’s territory. Escape.”

“And then? Once we’re out?” he demands.

“We...do what we have to do. All of us.”

He thinks. She can _feel_ it, though she isn’t watching him and is observing her own fiddling hands intently instead, twisting her gauze wraps in a cross around her shoulders and hips. Rey knows he’ll be chewing his cheek’s soft inner lining, working through the scenario, seeking a tactical advantage. She knows he’ll be frowning, eyes hooded, seeing the thousand ways any confrontation will go, watching them all play out and eliminating them, one by one. Weighing this newest option against the others: fight the First Order and lose _—_ painfully and probably slowly, knowing Hux _—_ or flee the dugout and die of thirst wandering the desert, searching for water that isn’t there. It’s nothing that Rey hasn’t worked through before, no unsatisfactory total that she hasn’t already tallied. The odds aren’t in their favor.

 _No_. There is no _they_.

“All right,” he says at last, as she’s known he will; what other reasonable choice is there for either of them to make it through? He’ll do what she wants, because he wants to survive. He needs her. “Can you find them?”

“Poe was planning to head to the nearest town to re-supply. He doesn’t need gasoline, so he probably won’t go to the working pumps where the First Order went. That place with the radiation. He’ll be traveling along the road. All I have to do is find the road, then head west.”

“You don’t want to go west.”

_Nevada. Takodana. The room with the green wallpaper._

“I know that!” she snaps. It’s unfair of him to use what he knows from last night against her, to even speak of it. He does, of course. “But it’s not like I’ve got a load of other options.”

“Fine. Great.” He shoulders past her into the dugout, stuffs his sleeping bag into its sack, and tosses the fresh rattlesnake jerky to her from the larder hole, harder than necessary.

Snatching the meat out of the air, Rey scowls and stuffs the tough strips into her bag. Her canteen’s already packed, full of clean water. She crawls away from him, grabs her staff leaning against the dugout’s entrance, and strides up the riverbed to the quad, pulling her hair back into its ties and snapping on her makeshift dust goggles. Everything she owns, she carries.

“The gas tank’s full,” she says, not turning around, but knowing he’s standing behind her. “We should get around two hundred or two hundred and fifty miles out of it, if the fuel economy holds steady.”

“Will that be enough to find them?”

“How the hell should I know? Maybe.”

“Okay. Are you driving, or am I?”

“I am.” With difficulty, Rey wheels the heavy hunk of metal and rubber up the riverbank. Ren doesn’t offer to help her. She’d have slapped him if he had; she wishes he would’ve tried. She swings her leg over the quad’s seat and flexes her foot on the gas. The engine turns over, rumbling to life when she punches the ignition. The seat sinks and the wheels rise up near her knees when Ren settles behind her.

“If you fall off, I’m not coming back for you,” she tells him, handing her staff over her shoulder for him to sling across his back.

There’s a moment while he adjusts the quarterstaff so it won’t catch in the quad’s rear wheels, and then one of his arms slips around her waist, tighter and lower than is comfortable, holding her against the familiar contours of his chest, nestling her bottom between his thighs while his other hand rests against her leg. _Bastard_.

Rey slams down on the gas.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew! *fans self*
> 
> If you're enjoying Sun, Sand, and Stone, tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! (Seriously, I live for comments!)
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reunion time.

She sets a punishing pace, tearing across the desert floor, heading southwest with her head bent forward into the dust and the wind, grit flinging up from the quad’s wheels. Tiny shards of flying rock and bleached bone sting Kylo’s unprotected eyes, razing his lips. He wishes he had his helmet. He could tuck his face against the bronzed curve of Rey’s neck, shielding himself and breathing in her scent of sweat and water, his hands firm around her waist, her supple body pressed intimately against his groin with the quad’s propulsion _—_ but he doesn’t. Last night, she’d whimper and arch into his questing mouth as he tastes her pulse, palms flexing, dipping low on her stomach.

She’d probably kill him, today.

What the hell is her _problem_?

She’d crawled into his arms like she belonged there, fitting the contours of her body to his, softening as he’s never seen or felt her before, and he’d held her while they slept, content to just be with her like this, so natural and right, almost better than the desire-drenched, giddy ways they’d fucked each other six ways from Sunday. He can still taste Rey on his tongue...Kylo shifts on the quad behind her.

A scowl radiates through Rey’s whole figure, and she chastises them both with another punch to the accelerator, jamming her back against him, harder.

It’s not like he can help his cock stiffening when the curve of her bottom is nestled so perfectly between his legs, shuddering with friction. The quad’s seat isn’t meant to hold two people. Just like in the sleeping bag, they’re pressed together in a space meant for one.

He can feel the thunder of her pulse in her ribcage where his arms are wrapped around her waist, but she’s refusing him, hot and cold all at once, her body burning while her words and demeanor are all icy, sneering disdain.

He wants to ask her _why_ , but Kylo Ren’s never been one to talk through his damn _feelings_. Least of all with a girl who’s rejecting him after he fucked her until she cried out with her fingers tangled in his hair, when he’d give anything to hear her sob out his name, _feel_ her again _—_ what does it fucking matter which name she cries, so long as she’s with him?

No, it matters.

Because she doesn’t want him. After all he’s shared with her, all he’s promised, she wants _Ben Solo_. Or she thinks she does. No one wants the real Ben Solo.

_Please, Ben!_

Well, she’s stuck with him instead. With who he is. He’d tried to be the man she wanted in that eldritch lapse of time while the rains came and they were together _—_ when they were safe _—_ but now the desert and everything in it’s trying to kill them again, Rey’s icy through the heat for reasons he can’t understand, and Ben Solo is fucking _useless_.

He wants her so much that he hates her a little.

He wants to fight her, and fuck her, and hold her. He wants _everything_.

All Rey gives him is her hard spine and grit tearing his eyes. So he takes what she offers, angry and terribly, terribly grateful.

So weak.

They don’t talk for the first hour of blazing across the desert, parallel with the sun rising higher and hotter into the sky, burning through the last wisps of cool, rain-scented air. In the second hour, they both begin to sweat. Rey cuts the ignition and drags out her canteen; they can’t spare vital drops spilling from drinking while the quad’s running over the rough ground. She fastens her lips in a seal over the nozzle, then wipes it clean before handing the bottle to him.

Kylo wipes the nozzle again, because it feels good to see her scowl. He knows what to do with that expression on her haughty face, and glowers right back at her.

So now they’re back to this.

 _She’s_ driven them back to it. Forced him back _—why, Rey? I don’t understand—_ and he doesn’t want to be just her reluctant ally, but if that’s all she’ll give him, he’ll take it.

They resume their ride without speaking.

It’s torture.

Rey navigates to a pitted streak of asphalt scarring across the desert’s tawny expanse around what Kylo thinks is noon from a hasty finger calculation against the horizon. The road. She slows the quad to an idle, rolling forward until its wheels jut up against the manmade material. He thunks his chin on the back of her head. Rey rubs the sore spot absently, just missing clawing out his eyes with her sharp fingers.

“Last chance,” she says.

“For what?”

She shrugs against him, shoulder blades grazing his chest. Careful of splintered asphalt slabs that could punch through a tire, Rey eases the quad onto the road. Then she turns them ninety degrees west, and without warning she ratchets up the speedometer to 60 mph in a flat ten seconds. He doesn’t mean to let out a breathless, pitchy _whoop!_ , but he does, sounding like a kid on a bike for the first time. _Shit_. He shrivels with embarrassment at the juvenile noise, when he’s tried so hard to impress her _—_

Rey’s gone very still, but then her shoulders shiver. _Laughing_. A tiny crack in the icicle of this woman. A thaw. The sound bursts through her lips, whipping back to him on the wind. Her snorting glee, mocking him.

He worships it. He wants to catch that sound on his tongue and hold it there, savoring her laughter.

“Do you remember riding past me on your dirt bike and flipping me off?” he shouts next to her ear. “That was the first time I’d laughed in probably years!”

“I’d do it again! You deserved it! You were being a total jerk!” she shouts back, stiffening. But then, as if she can’t help herself, she adds, “If I’d known you were laughing, I’d have given you both middle fingers!”

“How’d you steer if you had your hands off the bars?”

“Like this!” Rey releases her grip on the quad, throwing up both middle fingers to him behind her while raising a knee to brace their direction, keeping them on the pavement but swerving crazily over the defunct yellow center line.

“You’re insane!” One wobble at this speed, and they’ll end up dead underneath the quad’s smoking shell _—_

“I know!”

So what if they crash? Rey’s talking to him. Annoyed and unwilling, but she’s not shutting him out anymore. He laughs and laughs, whooping again, making her snort so hard she coughs.

“Shut up, shut up, I need to concentrate,” she orders him breathlessly.

“On what? There’s nothing to see _—_ ”

But that’s not right, he realizes. A distant speck on the horizon that he took for a sunspot or a mirage is steadily resolving into a rectangle propped up on posts. Shot through with bullet holes, spray-painted with neon dicks and gang territory symbols in the age-old signals for anarchy, it’s a road sign.

_Next right to Fancyfree, Arizona_

_Population 3,367_

What a charming name for a town in the middle of fucking nowhere.

“That it?”

“Maybe.”

The sign looms up, blocking a patch of broiling sky. Rey decelerates marginally as she takes a bumpy side road from the highway they’ve been blazing along. They galumph through potholes for a couple miles, and then Rey cuts the engine, pushes up her goggles, and they dismount to walk the quad, not wanting to make too much noise. They don’t talk as they approach a series of huddled buildings with exposed cinderblock sides ahead, half-suffocated in sand and blowing dirt. Abandoned, of course. Wells will have dried up and gas lines shut off, even though the town’s too small to register for a nuclear strike or as an EMP target. Population fuck-all.

But Kylo unholsters his gun.

Rey twitches, but doesn’t snap at him to put it away.

And then something nearby _beeps_.

Kylo throws himself sideways so fast he probably gives himself whiplash, wrapping his arms tightly around Rey’s ribs as he falls, landing hard on top of her with his body splayed out over her limbs. She’s silent beneath him, winded or terrified. He’s both. The sun bakes down, concentrated by reflective aluminum roofs on the town’s edge, a hot breath of wind skimming over his shirt where he’s hunched behind the quad, covering Rey from shrapnel or a gunshot or an exploding cloud of smoke like a mushroom, and…

Nothing happens.

Nothing happens for thirty seconds, or for a minute. Two minutes.

Then very distinctly, Rey says, “Ouch.”

“Sorry...I…” Sunlight’s reflecting in her hazel irises, open and alive. “I thought…”

“Me, too.” She breathes, a shudder deep in her chest. She stares up at him, his own reflection eclipsing the light in her eyes. Then she blinks, taking in the spread of his body upon hers, the way he’s flung himself over her without thinking, without calculating the injury he’ll take in her stead and without _caring_ , just pure instinctive reflex to protect her _—of course. I promised._ A tiny tremble tucks the corner of her mouth. She softens against him, eyes glowing with moisture. Then she blinks again, coming back to herself. She squirms, pushing on his chest with flat palms. “But _ouch_.”

He lets her up, cautiously disentangling himself from her. He doesn’t want to, but he does. That sudden softness, like a moment of realization...Kylo retrieves his pistol and sweeps it in a scan across the immediate area. He steadies his voice with tactical words. “Keep your head down. Would your friends have set an exploding tripwire, anything like that?”

“They’re not my friends. But...maybe.” Rey considers this with an averted face while she brushes dust off her clothes, smearing muddy sweat along her arms. Her eyes swivel under lowered brows, wary and alert, looking everywhere except at him. But it’s better. _That softening_. “Either that, or they’re holed up in whatever bar this town’s got, drunk and telling rude jokes.”

“Let’s assume the first.”

She snorts. “Knowing Poe Dameron, I think we should assume both.”

Rey refuses to stay behind while Kylo scouts Fancyfree’s seedy outskirts for the sorts of nasty pitfalls he’d rig to warn off or incapacitate intruders. Because she’s stubborn as a damn camel, and because she might take off on the quad if he lets her out of his sight, running away from her softness and from him, he agrees to take her along.

 _Agrees_ isn’t the right word. She doesn’t offer him a say.

“Stay here.”

“No.”

So they go together, swinging their weapons up against the creak of a fallen shutter, the hiss of wind around dilapidated hinges. Past a grocery store, where shattered automatic doors give a feeble twitch toward courtesy, their electronic systems probably wiped out as the town’s abandoned generators wound down.

Kylo almost obliterates a blowing plastic bag before Rey slaps his hand, a finger on her chapped lips. Making noise will let Finn and the other man know they’re here, but the sounds they make will also alert anything else nearby that it has company.

Rattlesnakes, biker clans _—_ he’d recognized one of the road sign’s graffiti symbols as belonging to a Guavian death gang, recalling General Snoke’s lectures on how to recognize an enemy versus an expendable _—_ a pack of wild dogs...his brain spins into overdrive _—_

Rey kicks him hard in the knee to catch his attention. Cursing under his breath, he follows the jerk of her head up an alleyway, its filthy dumpsters and gutters scrubbed clean by scouring sand and scavengers, to where faint traces of human noise echo through the empty streets. He shadows her as she darts into the alley, its walls so narrow that he could probably jump between the buildings on either side from their roofs, emerging in a back street where faded signs advertise a tattoo parlor, a $55-per-night or $15-per-hour motel, and a shabby bar-cum-pool hall. Green felt’s been ripped off the tables with slashes from a knife or a machete. The cues are snapped and broken into evil splinters.

The noise they’ve stalked is coming through a broken window by the nearest pool table. Kylo really doesn’t want to step inside that shady room _—_ this looks so much like a trap that it’s practically an advertisement _—_ but Rey just elbows his ribs and cocks her head up at him.

 _Listen_ , she mimes.

He does, and the noise...it’s singing.

Off-key, slurry, half-drunk singing.

“ _There must be some kind of way outta here_

 _Said the joker to the thief…_ ”

Before that can really register _—_ the sheer cocky _stupidity_ of it, because who the hell gets drunk in the desert where everything’s trying to kill you? _—_ Rey marches up to the door leaning off its hinges, keeping her body behind the building’s half-collapsed wall in a bare gesture toward caution. She calls in a low voice, “Poe? Finn, it’s Rey.”

A glass breaks.

Then _—_ “ _Rey?_ ” Disbelief. “Sunshine?”

“Yeah,” she hedges, frowning, which warms Kylo’s knotted stomach. “I’m _—_ ”

“Holy shit, you came back! Poe, she found us. _She came back!_ ”

A scuffle in the dim room, one figure lunging for the door and another grabbing it by the arm, hauling the first figure back. A curse.

“That really you, sweetheart?” An unfamiliar voice _—_ cautious, not slurring. Slightly gritty. Definitely a man.

 _Sweetheart_. And now Kylo wants to punch something _—_

“Poe, I’m not unarmed, and I’m not alone, so _—_ ”

Finn’s just laughing and laughing, sounding as though he’s bubbling with alcohol and happiness, but this Dameron bastard’s a little smarter. “Who’s with you, sweetheart?”

Kylo steps into view like a goddamn idiot, placing a hand on Rey’s shoulder. She shivers, teeth flashing like she wants to bite him. “ _Me._ ”

A beat. “Okay, I’ll play. Who’re you?”

“Kylo Ren.”

An unflattering silence. Then, Finn groans. Dameron says, “Oh. Yeah, you’ve come up in conversation a couple times.”

Translation: _Finn’s been talking shit about you_.

Rey’s elbow in his ribs again says, _Be nice_.

“And you’re Poe Dameron.” He tries to modulate the anger in his voice _—_ Finn knows nothing about him, and he doesn’t care about being liked, but... _You bastard_ , he tacks on mentally.

“Guilty as charged. So what’re you doing out here with Rey, Kylo Ren? The way I hear it, you’re a mean piece of work, man. I’m sorta surprised she hasn’t _—_ ”

 _Me, too, you fucker. Me, too_.

“Can we come inside for a minute?” Rey interjects. “If you want to kick us out again, fine, but it’s really hot, and we’ve come a long way to find you _—_ ”

Dameron’s voice mellows when he speaks to her, which Kylo doesn’t like _at-fucking-all_. “Want a drink while you’re at it? There’s plenty.”

“You’ve got water?”

“Nah,” Finn cuts in. “Whiskey.”

“You were right,” Kylo tells her. The corner of Rey’s mouth twitches, but she’s all business when shadows inside the saloon approach the pavement, resolving into Finn motioning them through the ramshackle door, and an unfamiliar man with an ancient shotgun who must be Poe Dameron.

Kylo hates him on sight. Blessed shade inside the decrepit, dingy pool hall does nothing to cool his dislike. Goddamn pretty-boy, with tumbling, curly hair and a wide, white smile that manages to engulf Rey and bypass Kylo completely. The shotgun doesn’t disregard him, though. It’s a lot bigger than Kylo’s pistol.

“I can’t believe you’re here.” Finn’s looking Rey up and down like he’s checking her over for injuries from her time away, a stupid, lopsided grin on his face. He ignores Kylo with some damn offensive body language. “I thought for sure you weren’t coming back. That you’d left for good.”

The tips of Rey’s exposed ears turn pink. “Um, well I’m back now?”

“For how long?” Dameron asks. “Still don’t have any gasoline for you to steal, sweetheart.”

“I...I actually came out here to find you, from what I remembered about where you were headed, because I…” There’s no point in beating around the metaphorical bush, a conclusion Rey obviously reaches as well. “We’re running. From the First Order.”

Finn’s mouth tightens and pales. He turns to Dameron. “They’re bad shit. I told you how they _—_ ”

“Ren’s one of them, though, isn’t he?” Dameron’s shotgun makes an idle arc toward Kylo.

Rey steps between the muzzle and Kylo’s chest; he can’t breathe until the shotgun lowers. “Not anymore. We’re both running. Finn, I’m really sorry about stealing your quad, and I know I don’t have any right to ask this from you, Poe, but...I wouldn’t be here if I had any other options. So...can we ride with you? Just a couple hundred miles, until they won’t be able to track or catch us. Then you can drop us off wherever, and _—_ ”

 _We_. Natural on her tongue.

Dameron holds up a finger, and Rey’s babbling cuts off like a tap. “I like you, sweetheart,” he says. “You’re all prickle, and it’s pretty good fun to wind you up. Best fun I’d had for a long time before I met the two of you. But more important than that, Finn likes you.” He brushes the hand not holding his shotgun along Finn’s cheek in an astonishingly intimate gesture, thumb lingering on Finn’s mouth. How long have they even known each other? A couple days, and they’re already...the way Kylo and Rey were, last night.

Dameron continues, unabashed. “So there’s space for you in BB-8” _—_ a nonsense word _._ “But your friend, here...Finn doesn’t like him, and I can’t say I do, either.” The shotgun swivels so fast it’s a blur. “Why’d you defect from your First Order cronies, huh?”

“You ask Finn that?” Kylo challenges him.

“Yeah, and now I’m asking you. How come?”

Because _—_

Because…

Because of Rey and her offensive middle fingers, and the way she rides a bike like she was born to it, and because she defies him with a smile under her frown _—_ _softening—_ and because she’s reckless, and because she cares _so damn much_ , and she drowns out the punishing voice in his head with her cries under his hands and mouth, and because she’s so goddamn beautiful that it _hurts_.

Because every moment with her is being alive.

None of which he’s going to say out loud, least of all to Poe Dameron, with his _sweethearts_ and his stupid, handsome face, the short fucker. He’ll go to hell first, and that’s straight where he’s running if Rey leaves him behind again.

So Kylo just scowls in answer.

Dameron sighs, exaggerated regret and lifted shoulders. “Fine. Rey, sweetheart? Can you give me a reason why we should take him along? Why you want him along? If you do.”

Rey turns to him, away from Dameron. She’s silent. Her hazel irises sweep over his; for once, her expressive face is closed to him. She’s unreadable, the dim room dousing the glow from her eyes, blending her into the shadows so that soft and hard are inextricably mingled. He can’t tell what she’s thinking. And that scares him, so he turns his scowl on her, and just waits for the blow to come. She’s going to leave him. Of course she is. Why wouldn’t she? No matter what’s happened between them, he’s not the man she wants. She’s going to choose Finn and the cocky idiot with the shotgun, and she’s going to say _—_

“I want a drink.” Rey plunks herself down, balancing on a three-legged chair and rapping her knuckles against a smashed-in table.

The _fuck_?

When Finn’s collected his jaw off the floor and offered her a chipped glass and a dusty bottle of what looks like brown cleaning fluid _—_ “Looters didn’t grab it ’cause it looks like crap, but it still tastes okay...” _—_ she drinks a slugging mouthful straight from the decanter. Coughing, she wipes a hand across the back of her mouth. She drinks again. Again, like she’s taking shots. Then, Rey slams her palms flat on the table.

“Okay.” She over-articulates the word to compensate for the alcohol flooding her empty system, edging her toward drunk way too fast. Her eyes are already glazed and slightly crossed. She seems to focus them with difficulty. “I don’t wanna talk about why. If I’m gonna come with you, I don’t want you to ask me any more about him, okay? ’Cause I can’t figure him out, and it’s all mixed up now, and I dunno, and I don’t...”

“But sweetheart, we’ve gotta decide _—_ ”

“Nope. Not deciding.” Rey swallows another mouthful. “Tired of deciding all the time. ’S the point of finding you, you know. Pack. Like wolves. For a little while.” And she must be dehydrated as shit, because eight straight gulps of whiskey in, she slumps against the table with her cheek on her arm.

Kylo, Dameron, and Finn just...look at each other over her drooped head for a minute. That went from bad to damn weird really fucking fast.

Then _—_ “I could shoot you now.” Dameron’s shotgun lifts. “Save us and her a whole lotta trouble. She’s a good kid, Ren, and you’re bad news. Finn’s told me plenty, but I’d see it in you, even if he hadn’t. I don’t think you’re gonna go quietly if she wants to come along with us instead of sticking around with you.”

“Shoot me, and you’ll wake her up,” Kylo returns, staring down the barrel.

“Let her sleep,” Finn says, reaching over to brush hair out of Rey’s mouth, not looking at him. “We can give her that, at least.”

So they pass around the whiskey bottle to pass the time, waiting for Rey to wake up, to go back to fighting and maybe killing each other. It’s surreal, this truce they’ve woven out of nothing, out of respect for a sleeping girl. It won’t last. But the whiskey settles low in Kylo’s stomach, and he watches Rey sleep, and...it’s almost okay.

For now, it’s okay.

The sun slides down from noon, to three, to sunset. The bottle’s empty. They’ve been silent for hours. Rey sleeps. Bored and half-wasted, they doze with her after a while, whiskey sending them slipping away in the quiet.

“Did you...set a tripwire or anything?” Kylo manages, eyes hooded and slumped down on the floor next to Rey’s stool, where he’s positioned himself to catch her if she droops off the table.

Dameron yawns. “Nah. Who was gonna bother us while we stocked up? There’s no one else out here who knows where to find us, ’cept you two.”

“Then…” _What was that beeping?_

But his tongue’s as drowsy as his brain. Why would the First Order look for them here? Until Rey wakes up...it’s okay…

Rey topples off her stool around midnight, landing with a thump and a huff of breath on his chest. She fists her hands into his jacket and he cradles her shoulders, nearly asleep and pretty damn drunk. They both are. Which is why it’s okay for them to be like this for one more night, when she’ll send him to hell in the morning. Why it’s okay to kiss her, taste the dark, amber whiskey on her lips. She moans into his mouth, clutching tighter. He can’t help himself, slipping his tongue over hers. But then her eyelashes flutter against his cheek, waking as her body warms against him, _remembering_ with a gasp and a choked breath in her chest _—_

“You’re asleep,” he whispers into her hair, aching for her, but he won’t hold her if she fights him. “This is a dream.”

Another startled breath...and then she relaxes, allowing him to coax her back into his arms. Rey nestles against his side with a little grunt of satisfaction when he draws his sleeping bag over them, curling his body around hers to keep away the cold on this grimy, paradisiacal pool hall floor.

“Good dream,” she mumbles.

—

Sunlight refracting off broken glass. Its brilliance slices through his eyelids. His body smarts, muscles stiff and kinked from sleeping on hard, bare planks. He opens his eyes with caution. His vision’s only a little blurry after yesterday’s indulgence with the whiskey, thank god.

And thank God almighty, Christ in heaven _—_ he tacks on the sacred epithets with appropriate devotion _—_ because Rey’s still here, huddled into a cavity carved into his chest, stomach, and thighs that he’s hollowed out for her. She’s tucked up her hands beneath her cheek, and her head’s pillowed on his forearm. The fingers of her right hand have fastened around his wrist, nails just grazing his skin. She’s breathing with him, slow and steady, and sunshine gilds her loosened hair.

He’d give anything to remain like this, with Finn snoring in the background and Dameron stretching next to Finn on the creaking floorboards, the cocky bastard ready to open his mouth in a yawn and spout off, and Rey....just Rey. _Just this_.

But he can’t. _She_ can’t. She has her decision to make. So Kylo wakes her by drawing away from her curved spine resting so comfortably against him, cooler air washing in to take his place _._ The only place he wants to be.

Her lips flutter _—_ a protest. “Ben…”

“Not Ben,” he tells her. She frowns, reaching behind her as though to prove him wrong, reaching into the emptiness where his body has sheltered her. Her fingers scrabble and catch at nothing. He has to look away.

“But…”

He feels the moment when she realizes that she’s alone, though he carefully isn’t watching her. He can give her that privacy, at least.

Floorboards whine as Rey sits up beneath the blanketed sleeping bag, its nylon shell swishing against her skin and her clothes as it slides down her body, exposing her in this grungy pool hall. What a terrible way to wake up. She whimpers and presses her palms to her temples.

“Oh, god…”

“You had a lot to drink yesterday,” he tells her, awkward and unsure of what to do with his hands. He’s damn sure that Dameron’s watching him for the slightest slip-up, the faintest indication that he’s going to hurt her. How can this man not see that hurting Rey is the last thing he’d ever do? _Fuck_ Poe Dameron. He jams his fists into his pockets against the temptation to hit something, against his desire to smooth the pad of his thumb along Rey’s eyelids, stroking away gummy sleep sand; he knows the posture gives him a judgmental look, looming over her while she processes her situation, her headache. He’s not judging her and he’s not trying to loom...but he just _does_.

Rey gives him a baleful, squinting glare. “You let me sleep all afternoon and through the whole night?” She coughs, frowning. Her mouth probably tastes like cotton and regret.

He hands her the half-empty canteen from her satchel. “You’ll feel better if you have some water.”

“I’m capable of dealing with my own hangovers and stupid decisions,” she snips, tongue flopping against her teeth. She grimaces.

“I know you are.”

Her lips tremble, seeking a retort. Whatever she comes up with isn’t satisfactory, so she grabs the canteen and drinks instead.

“How’re you feeling, sweetheart?” Dameron’s shaking Finn awake, then rolling back his shoulders and tugging on his ear to get a crick out of his neck.

“Awful.” Rey smiles at him over the canteen, a little shakily.

And though Dameron looks like a damn fool, the pit of Kylo’s stomach flares hot with jealousy for her light tone, for her smile.

Rey makes the day’s mark on her chalky stone, then stands, bracing herself against the wall. She’s pretty steady on her feet when she steps off toward the door. Of course she recovers fast.

“Where are you going?” He can’t help it—the words just slip out. _Fuck_ , he sounds so insecure. But she’s going to decide this morning whether to leave him behind; he doesn’t want to let her out of his sight, because this might be the last day he ever sees her, Rey, with her brilliant hazel eyes and her messy hair spiraling around her ears—

“You know what happens when you drink a lot?” She points rudely to her bladder.

“Be careful.”

Rey rolls her eyes at him. “If the First Order shows up, I’ll scream. And don’t _follow_ me, Ren.”

“You heard her,” Finn tells Kylo when he takes an instinctive half-step forward to keep her in view while Rey and her staff swing through the door and into the nearest alley. Finn gives a threatening wave with a wrapper from a nutrition bar he’s chowing on. “Don’t be clingy, man.”

Soldier 2187 never talked to him this way. So who the hell is this guy, now? It’s Dameron’s fault, he’s completely certain.

“I’m not _clingy_.”

Finn and Dameron exchange a look and a snort. Pummeling their smug faces would give him some potent and much needed satisfaction, but Rey probably wouldn’t like it. So he restrains himself.

“Still bad news,” Dameron tells him, like he’s read Kylo’s mind.

_Fuck this short fucker._

He seethes, edgy and anxious, struggling against the compulsion to crane his neck for a better view of the street while they stand in a silence that’s not nearly so companionable as their not-particularly-companionable drinking last night.

Shadows tick on. What are they waiting for?

Dameron’s hand strokes along Finn’s back while he hefts his shotgun into the crook of his other elbow. Safety on, his thumb flicks against the trigger with an irritating _click_ , _click_ , _click_. Finn’s working his fingers along the zipper in his backpack, checking for his aloe vera and that stupid toothbrush. And Kylo’s palm covers the butt of the pistol holstered on his belt. Rey’s still gone, and they’re all watching the street, instinctively ranging themselves into a line by micro-movements as the minutes wax, a bulwark of derelict chairs and overturned tables offering cover before them.

There’s no way the First Order will find them here.

All they’re doing is waiting for Rey to come back and send Kylo to hell.

But that’s not all they’re doing, and they know it.

 _Fuck_ , one of them should’ve gone with her—how could he let her—

“I’m—” He makes it one stride toward the rickety door before a light, deadly clatter registers in his ears. The pavement in front of the pool hall explodes, blasting him backwards through the air, his body slamming through the tables and against the far wall. There’s a goddamn crater where the front of the building used to be, and shadows that aren’t shadows are materializing through smoke issuing from a shitty, hacked-together, effective grenade, and—

All he can think is, _Rey, run!_ But he can’t breathe, all the wind knocked from his chest while the shadows form into three figures approaching through the wreckage.

“We’ve got company,” Dameron wheezes _—too little, too late—_ and then _—_

“Well, well, well,” a familiar voice says, ginger-haired and weasel-faced.

 _Hux_. Phasma behind him, knife in one hand, pistol in the other, covering Dameron and Finn, their faces scratched and bleeding from flying splinters, empty-handed from the grenade blast knocking their weapons out of reach. And Mitaka, holding a small, rectangular box with a flickering screen that Kylo recognizes as the First Order’s GPS system.

“Three holes in the ground,” Kylo manages with a mixture of disdain and choking breath.

Hux hesitates mid-stride, frowning, trying to work out what Kylo’s said, whether it’s an insult, his lips shaping _three holes_ …

“An idiom, sir,” Mitaka supplies. “Uh...it’s supposed to be funny, because a well is a hole in the ground?”

“What?”

“ _Hux_.” Phasma jerks her chin at Kylo’s hand inching toward his pistol fallen beside him on the floor.

Hux collects himself and approaches with his gun aimed directly over Kylo’s nose, sneering with an extra dose of villainy to compensate for his confusion. It’s kind of hilarious. Or it would be, if Kylo weren’t in danger of having his brains splattered in Rorschach art over the room’s cheap plywood paneling. One of Hux’s eyes twitches; the danger threshold ratchets up another notch, and adrenaline spikes Kylo’s body, spilling over his tongue.

“Can’t say it’s nice to see you, you bastard,” he says.

Like a broken record, clearly having planned for this moment and now experiencing trouble adjusting to the actual circumstances, Hux starts, “Well, well—”

“You’ve already used that one.”

The asshole blinks, and then his twitching gaze spins to Phasma. She rolls her eyes and mimes pulling her trigger. Reminding him why they’ve left their pond.

 _Kill these fuckers and get out of here_.

Thank god Rey’s outside. She’ll have heard the explosion. If Dameron’s vehicle is really solar-powered, it won’t make much noise when the engine starts. Assuming she can find the car and figure out how to drive it _—_ and he thinks she probably can _—_ she’ll escape before the First Order realizes she’s here, alive—

He can give her that time, at least.

So.

“How’d you find me?” he asks, playing for an offhand tone.

Unexpectedly, it’s Mitaka who answers. “I fixed the GPS transmitter. Turns out, General Snoke chipped all our quads with tracking beacons.”

 _The beep_. That must’ve been the tracker on his bike activating. _Fuck!_

“When?” He needs to keep them stalled, keeping them talking.

“During the heatwave and the storm. Wasn’t much else to do, and water’s a good conductor.”

Goddamn boy-scout.

“So you tracked me here.” Singular, keep his words singular. He can’t expose Rey.

“And look what we found. Two live traitors and an idiot who leaves _these_ in the car.” Keys jingle, dangling from Phasma’s index finger on her pistol’s trigger. Taunting.

Dameron groans, but he stays put instead of lunging for the keys. Smarter than Kylo’s given him credit for being.

The First Order’s found the vehicle, probably while scouting a perimeter around the building, tracking sounds of shuffling feet on the pool hall’s rattletrap floorboards, listening for low-voiced conversation or drunk singing. And if Phasma has the keys...Rey’s fuck out of luck with the car.

 _Shit, shit, shit_.

“So—” he starts in, with no idea how he’s going to finish his sentence, but he has to buy her more time—

“No more talking, Ren,” Phasma tells him, cool and deadly. “Get up. Slowly, hands over your head. Soldier 2187, you and your useful friend, too. It’s too dark in here to kill you, and I want to have a good view while I watch you die.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oooooh cliffhanger!
> 
> If you're enjoying Sun, Sand, and Stone, tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.
> 
> (And for those of you interested in my Wild West AU, get excited! It should go up on July 1st!)


	19. Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nothing to see here, folks. Just our girl checkin' shit off her list.

Rey’s squatting in the shade of a flapping tin overhang above a rickety porch several streets away from the pool hall, relieving the intense pressure on her bladder, when an explosion punches through the day’s quiet, shaking the walls around her, making buildings’ metallic sidings shimmer and boom like the inside of her aching head. Debris spirals into the air, a cloud of noxious dust drifting into the alley behind the bar.

And before the dry, hot wind even catches at these puffs of dirt to whirl them into the sky, she knows with perfect clarity that the First Order has found them. It’s not even a conscious realization. She just _knows_. Her body has her sprinting almost twenty yards away from the town before her brain catches up with her muscles. Her pounding feet slow fractionally, jarring her head.

Yes, her head. Her miserable skull.

 _Think, Rey. Use your head_.

If she can get to the quad—no, it’d be better to take Poe’s car parked behind the pool hall, no need for gasoline—she could outrun them. She’d survive.

She’d hate herself.

Because Finn and Poe are back in the bar.

And so is Kylo Ren. Or Ben Solo. Whoever he is right now.

Her body whispers, _mine_.

No.

But she won’t abandon them. Because all of this is her fault.

It’s always been her fault.

Trusting Ren was her fault. And now that terrifying woman and the disgusting ginger snake and the pimply teenager are going to kill him because she trusted him enough to—

Love him.

That stops her feet so fast that Rey staggers, falling forward onto her elbows and knees. The new pain of scraping skin clears some of the ache from her head. She fastens onto this tiny success, because it’s the only thing keeping her from thinking, but she can’t erase knowledge anymore than she can force rain back into the sky—

 _Holy hell_.

She...she...does.

She hardly even likes him, and it’s so totally unexpected that she never saw it coming. Making him hers—yes, she’d wanted that like she’d wanted whiskey, fierce and angry and a little painful. She’d wanted him. But...this is different. Him throwing his body over hers yesterday, protecting her at the peril of his own death...taking her pain...slipping into his arms and sleeping. It’s been easier after the rainstorm to believe he’s just been using her. Safer, even if it hurts. Because if he isn’t only trying to convince her to survive to keep himself alive...then he...he...And she doesn’t know what to do with these sensations in her body. They make her so, so afraid.

He’s going to die, unless…

Unless.

Maybe thirty seconds have elapsed since the explosion. Thirty seconds, and everything’s changed.

 _Okay, okay. Think_.

But she can’t, her heart beating too fast, smiling and crying all at once, because now she _knows_ —

 _If we survive_.

Forcing herself to stand up, Rey slings her staff over her shoulder. _Focus. Don’t think about him. Not yet_. She needs a vantage point. She needs to see what’s happening, but she’s surrounded by buildings, blocking her line of sight to the pool hall through a sprawl of derelict houses and alleyways. However, the buildings _also_ hide her from the First Order. She can use this.

Rey ghosts back along her flight path, flitting through shadows and behind any scanty cover. She makes no sound.

 _Predator_.

Three streets over from the pool hall, she slows. Ducking sideways, she tests a cinderblock wall with her fingers. _Hunters take the high ground._ Mortar comes away in flakes beneath her nails, malleable to her needs, but the building rises several stories without so much as a friendly drain pipe or a window ledge to break the wall’s expanse. _Fine_. Kicking off her boots, Rey spits on the soles of her feet and into her palms. She grips her boots’ tattered leather in her teeth. She digs out a narrow crevasse for her fingers between cinderblocks about seven feet up from the ground. And she begins to climb.

Her head wants to twist and tilt, looking into empty air beneath her until a hollow tunnel of vertigo opens in her chest and she steps into nothingness, but Rey keeps her eyes fixed upward, seeking the next finger-hold, then the next, wedging her toes into the mortar, spittle on her palms and feet giving her traction like a gecko on the rough cinderblocks. If she falls—but she can’t afford that, so she won’t.

It’s a scramble with locked elbows to swing her legs up and onto the roof, muscles in her stomach curled and aching with the strain, but she manages it, landing on her back and rolling away from the dangerous edge onto flat, sunbaked shingles. But she picks herself up almost instantly into a crouch, slides her staff into her hands, and scuttles along the roof to its far side, looking down into the pool hall’s street about a hundred yards from a destroyed patch of pavement in front of the bar.

Six figures are emerging from what remains of the building’s front, three with hands clasped behind their heads in a universal prisoner stance. Rey breathes for the first time in what feels like an hour, her lungs on fire and her eyes swimming. She wipes them impatiently on her sleeve, hunched over so she won’t make a silhouette against the open air. It can’t have been more than five minutes since the explosion, and they’re still alive.

They’re all still alive.

Because there’s always some asshole who wants to monologue. Creeping closer along the roof, Rey grins down at the First Order. Not a single one of them looks up, or even glances away from her friends. Why should they? They have no reason to think she’s nearby. They probably think she’s dead. They’re not looking for an ambush.

So.

She needs to cross the next five buildings if she’s going to get onto the pool hall’s roof. The alleys are narrow, hardly wider than her riverbed. Well, a lot wider, actually, but not impossible. Only a little impossible. If she had a gun, she wouldn’t make it. But Rey’s got her staff.

She retreats to the roof’s far side. Before she can think too much about it, she raises her staff and she runs right at the blank air between this roof and the next one. Faster, faster, legs pumping, the edge speeding toward her feet—she plants her staff on the very last shingled inch and vaults up and forward, running still, running through gravity’s sudden confusion as she defies it, feet pounding on nothing—she’s flying, she’s a shaft of sunlight—and then gravity regains command and she begins to fall, tucking into her left side. She rolls through the wind so that she lands on her hip and shoulder instead of her breakable spine, skidding along the next roof’s patched, broken shingles just beyond its edge. Safe. Gulping and dizzy, but safe.

Exhilarated.

One down.

The space between the next two buildings’ roofs is slender enough that her staff spans its width. She lays the staff across the distance, then sprints across it like she’s in the damn circus, arms outstretched, toes curled around the wooden pole’s leather and metal casing.

What she’s doing is impossible. And insane.

She’s smiling around the boots clenched in her teeth as she vaults the third and fourth alleyways. Fearless. And then she jumps down onto the pool hall’s half-collapsed roof, soft as a shadow, barely twenty vertical feet away from the confrontation playing out in the street below.

Unlike the blonde woman, who seems much more efficient and therefore more dangerous, the ginger’s still talking _—that monologuing shit—_ pacing in front of Finn, Poe, and _him_ on their knees. A useful shit.

“I’ve been looking forward to this for a long, long time, Ren. You have no place in the First Order. You never have. _You_ acquiesce to _disorder!_ If the General were here, he’d see that now. He’d see that _I—_ ”

“ _Hux_.” The woman. _Phasma_.

The asshole flinches. Then he throws back his shoulders, sticking out his scrawny chest, and resumes his speech, reducing the reedy crack in his voice with increased volume. “You have no place at the pond. You have no place in this desert. You have no place being alive…” The list goes on.

Crawling forward on her stomach until she can see directly down onto the six heads below her, Rey’s upper arm connects painfully with a shard of pavement thrown up onto the roof from the explosion’s force. She winces as skin tears, rolling sideways and pressing her palm against a thin smear of blood. And she finds herself looking not down, but up the street. To where she left the quad, yesterday.

The quad...which is still there, glinting and glowering in the sunlight. Out in the open.

The idea that comes to her is totally mad...but no madder than anything else that’s happened in the past week.

There’s no way in hell it’s going to work. But by any stretch of imagination, she should already be dead a hundred times over. That she’s alive is miraculous. But is it really a miracle if she engineers it, herself? Engineering her own survival...and this. Rey grabs the pavement shard and another of its fellows.

She tries to move cautiously, but the pool hall’s roof is unstable from the explosion; several shingles clatter down onto the cratered sidewalk, raising skeins of dust when she’s too clumsy with her pulsing adrenaline.

Every head in the street below her swivels right, staring at the sudden disturbance. Cursing inwardly, Rey closes her eyes as though she can conceal herself within the darkness of her own skull. When she opens them an instant later—anxiety’s thundering through her body so that she couldn’t keep her head buried in the sand if she wanted to—Phasma’s sending Mitaka into the hollowed-out building to investigate, maybe stirring a half-memory of a girl who’s supposed to be gone, or dead...Neither of them looks up.

Somehow, a _true_ goddamn miracle, Rey’s managed to get the sun directly at her back, a brilliant, blinding shield burning her neck, concealing her.

But _he_ is looking up, directly into the sun, at her.

He sees her. Of course he does. He always has. She’s never been nothing to him, even when she wanted to be.

They cross gazes for only a moment, and then he looks away. He can’t draw attention to her location. Breaking their contact hurts worse than the threads of blood leaking down her arm. If she ever wants him to look at her again, she’s going to have to do this. Save his life.

And hers.

Rey inches back from the explosion-torn roof until she’s on solid shingles again. Then she crawls hand over fist, dragging her body away until the roof’s pitch hides her shape. She leaps onto the next building. Her bare feet landing on the other roof make no sound. She is a predator, and she’s hunting with the perfect silence of death at her side.

She means to kill.

When Rey reaches the street’s end where the buildings stop, she’s about seven yards from the quad, crouched on a one-storey structure that’s already half-sunken into blowing sand. Okay. That was the easy bit. This next part is going to be really damn tricky. She pulls on her boots, trying to collect herself with simple, familiar motions. She breathes. She needs to be calm, to steady her aim, when—

“There’s no one in there,” Mitaka reports from the pool hall, his voice carrying on the still air. “But I found this.” Even from her distance, Rey can see that he’s holding up her intact satchel. Of all the things to survive the blast...

_Fuck._

“The girl,” Hux spits. “Where is she? Ren, is she here? I’ll put a bullet through your arrogant skull if you don’t tell me right now—” The bastard shoves a pistol to the sensitive underside of his jaw.

That’s Rey’s place. Only Rey’s. To bite and kiss. Hers.

 _Mine_.

One pavement shard flies from her hand. It strikes true on the quad’s ignition switch. The engine roars to life at the same instant that the second shard lands on the gas pedal. It jams.

 _Shit_.

Hux jerks, staring at a cloud of dust rising around the quad’s spinning, stationary wheels. Confused for a vital second, finger almost slipping off the trigger—

 _He_ laughs. “Oh, you fucker, you’d better run while you can! Because you know what? _Rey’s coming for you._ ”

And then the gas pedal’s shard splinters from the force of the bike’s rotating wheels. The engine’s built up too much kinetic power to stay still, even with decreased pressure on the gas, and the quad shoots forward like a harpoon, exploding from zero to sixty up the street.

Prisoners and captors scatter in the sudden chaos.

Rey comes in its wake, shrieking like a banshee with rage and triumph, flying over roofs and alleys and launching herself off the pool hall straight into Phasma, tackling the other woman to the ground with the force of leaping off a two-storey building like the insane patroness of death and terror that she is. And she _likes_ it.

She likes the violence in her hands, hardening her body so that she’s all steel and fire.

“Did you see that?” Finn’s yelling at Poe through the billowing dust and pandemonium, pointing at Rey with a manic smile.

“I saw it!” Poe fist-pumps, whooping, and dives into the melee.

Rey grins.

Her staff swings against Phasma’s kneecap. The woman reels back, crashing into Mitaka who’s scrambling for his pistol while Poe’s lunged forward to opportunistically grab him in a headlock, sending the three of them staggering. Finn’s still on his knees in the dirt, and Rey vaults over him, twirling through the air. _He—Ben, Kylo, mine—_ catches her as she falls, bracing her against his back, her hand on his thigh, turning her momentum so that she slams into Hux’s stomach with both booted feet as the bastard reaches for her, his face a twisted snarl. He spins like a top from the rotation she’s thrown behind her dual kicks, and his pistol leaps from his hand with centrifugal force, straight into Ben’s grip.

Ben _—hers—_ straightens with wide eyes, pupils engorged in the same passionate rage and joy burning straight through her core.

“Rey, I—”

“I know.”

His pistol swings up to aim straight between her eyes. “ _Get down_.”

She drops.

He fires.

Mitaka screams and falls. Loose from Poe’s headlock after Rey sent Phasma crashing into them, his own shot explodes harmlessly overhead. A fine crimson spray dots the side of Rey’s face from a ruptured artery in his arm, crooked and useless where he’s sprawled on the ground, shrieking and clawing at the spouting vein.

She wipes blood off her cheek like smeared war paint. “You didn’t kill him.”

“Do you want me to?”

She’s glad that she doesn’t have to answer that; Hux is rising, winded but uninjured from her strike to his stomach, and he’s lunging at Finn. Both weaponless, they scrabble in the dirt, fighting with gouging fingers and elbows, brawling for something glinting in the dust between them. A flash of exposed metal catches the sun, no longer than a finger.

 _BB-8’s keys_.

“Finn!” Poe’s shouting, trying to dive around Phasma who’s caught his arm in a painful, twisting burn while her other hand draws up with a knife.

Rey hurls herself at the monstrous woman, snapping her staff down on the hand holding her friend. A finger breaks. Phasma howls and backhands Rey across the face using that same hand with the broken finger, as if pain is a stimulant. She’s released Poe—but she’s fastened that terrible grip around Rey’s staff, and no matter how she twists, Rey can’t break herself free without relinquishing the only weapon she has. She’s all anger and instinct and speed, but Phasma’s taller and stronger and knows how to hurt her with joints stretched the wrong way, with a knife held in her teeth now flicking so close to Rey’s face that she has to dance and dance, cold metal slicing a tendril of hair from her temple, just barely missing her eye, yet she won’t let go, she can’t—

But then Ben’s hands replace hers on the staff, his massive shoulders shoving her out of the way as the knife slashes down again, sending her a smile through the corner of his mouth because they both know he’s protecting her like he’s promised, and she lets him—but the knife tears into the flesh on his forehead instead of hers, carving a long stripe through his eyebrow, down his cheek, leaving a dripping, raging gash, a scarlet ribbon spilling across his face.

“ _Ben!_ ”

And he’s falling, stunned, eyes blank at the unexpected horror, the pain Rey feels across her own face like she’s been ripped open, too. Phasma swings the staff around from his slipping grasp and catches him under the chin, pressing the length hard against his throat, and—

A metallic sound makes a click against Rey’s temple. “You little bitch.” Hux’s reclaimed pistol marks a cold circle on the side of her head, the serrated edges of Poe’s keys biting against her cheekbone. He hauls her backward, away from Ben.

Static fills her brain, because—

Ben’s slumped against Phasma, not moving.

Finn’s on the ground clutching his stomach, one eye blackened, lip swollen, heaving for breath. Poe’s beside him, dragging Finn’s head into his lap, crying out his name as blood from Finn’s shirt stains his hands. A gunshot muffled against his body, or a thrown knife, it doesn’t matter, he’s hemorrhaging—

“Come on, Finn! Darlin’, stay with me—”

Ben’s pale as bleached bone beneath the spreading sanguinary threads leaking down his face, choking as Phasma tightens her grip on Rey’s staff, grinning or grimacing around the knife still held between her teeth. His hands lift to scrabble feebly at Phasma’s wrists, then fall back to his sides.

 _Shock_ , his body shutting down in panic at the pain, at the sudden prospect of dying right here, right now.

“Ben!” Rey screams again.

“ _Ben?_ ” Hux sneers. “You think Ben Solo’s going to save you? That useless, weak-chinned—don’t know what General Snoke saw in him—even letting him into the Order _—_ ”

 _Weak-chinned_.

Of all the insults he could’ve chosen, Hux has selected this one.

 _Thanks, motherfucker_. Rey means it sincerely.

“Ben, do you remember how we met?” She stares with all the potency she can muster at his scarlet-drenched face, willing him to meet her gaze, willing him to read her as he’s done so many times, to _understand_.

“I…” His voice is terrifyingly faint.

“Stop her talking,” Phasma snaps around her knife.

“ _Ben_. _You promised_.”

His dilated eyes flicker to hers. So much pain, life choking out of him.

“ _Remember_.”

Ben sags against Phasma.

“No—”

His falling body pulls her forward, off her balance. Phasma’s staggering on the balls of her feet against his deadweight when he straightens with sudden, desperate force, the back of his head colliding with her chin, bone on bone. His hands find Rey’s staff, heels digging into the ground and kicking backwards, hurling up his legs while Phasma stumbles, his body arching over hers, bearing down on her—

And Rey twitches faster than lightning, elbowing a distracted Hux in the groin with her left arm while her right swings up, fastening on his wrist, twisting the pistol away from her temple, forcing his finger on the trigger— _crackle, boom_ —the bullet tearing off into nothing, wrestling for a grip on his thumb, which she yanks down against his palm, dislocating it—he drops the gun and keys and onto his knees, howling, and she kicks the instruments away. A boot between his shoulder blades sends him sprawling, and she plants a foot against his neck, pressing down until he gags in the dirt.

_Ten seconds._

“Ben?” she calls.

There’s a satisfying _thwack_ of a quarterstaff against flesh. Phasma grunts out a long, low sigh, the sound of a body rendered unconscious. “I think I’m going to resign from the First Order,” Ben says with savage mildness. After-shock, adrenaline lending him a high to stave off the pain.

He grins through his split cheek and they stare at each other, a little stunned. Both alive.

But then Finn lets out a horrible moan and Rey’s hitching smile fades.

“Poe, what’s wrong with him?”

“Don’t know.”

“Well, is it bad?”

“Can’t tell.”

“Stop...talking about me like...I’m not...here,” Finn groans.

“You sticking around, then?” Poe asks him with obvious, giddy relief at just hearing his voice.

Finn rolls one eye; the other’s swollen shut. “That asshole Hux just elbowed me in the...solar plexus. The blood’s Mitaka’s. I was trying to save...but he’s...”

Mitaka, glassy-eyed and still.

Just a kid.

For some reason, this makes Rey angrier than all the rest. _He didn’t have to die_. Such a _waste_. She knows it was Ben who pulled the trigger to save her life, but it’s just so _wrong_ , because this kid was so young, and he never should’ve been in a place like this, with people like this, and she’s not angry with Ben—she’s really not—but she _hates_ it and she wants to hurt someone for it—

“Poe,” she says, trying to keep the furious tremor from her voice, pointing at Hux, “can you come here and make sure this bastard stays down?”

“Finn, are you—” Poe strokes a hand over Finn’s hair.

Finn motions him away. “Fine...just winded.”

So Poe assumes Rey’s place with a foot on Hux’s neck, grinding down with a grim pleasure until vertebrae crackle.

“Rey—” Ben calls to her when she turns aside from the carnage and fallen bodies in the street.

“I won’t be long.” She steps to him and lays her cheek against his unmarked one. Then she takes her staff from his unresisting hand. She whispers, “I promise.”

Picking up her satchel from the splintered pavement as she goes, Rey strides to Fancyfree’s outskirts. Here the ground is undisturbed by wheels or running feet or blood. She squats down, eyeing the soil, tracing her fingers through it. Reading it. She hesitates for only a moment, then steps off toward a hunched rocky mound that might’ve once been low concrete risers around a baseball diamond.

This is no more insane than anything else she’s done today. And she needs to do it.

Rey returns to where Hux is cursing into the dirt under Poe’s heel with her staff held away from her body and her satchel swinging from its end. The bag...rattles.

“Flip him over.”

Hux’s pale eyes follow the sack’s sway. Sweat gleams on his pasty skin.

“Ben, you once told me I was the most dangerous thing in the desert,” she says, holding Hux’s deadfish stare. “I told you I wasn’t venomous. But today, I’m feeling really fucking vindictive. And you know what _is_ venomous?”

Within her satchel, something hisses.

“This is an adult rattlesnake,” Rey tells them all, and she can feel Ben’s wicked grin like a sunrise in her ribcage. She smiles in answer, and Hux shudders. “Which means that it can bite wet, or dry. It’s a fifty-fifty chance, either way. But that’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

She drops the bag on Hux’s chest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I basically listened to this [piece](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hpBwyXMpA4) on repeat while writing this chapter...
> 
> And guess what? The Wild West AU I've been promising *forever* is finally going up! Check out _Rules of Engagement for Sinners and Saints_ [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15078044).
> 
> Ack, I'm super behind on answering comments, but know that I read and treasure each one! I'm hoping to get to my inbox next week. <3
> 
> If you're enjoying Sun, Sand, and Stone, tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.


	20. Chapter 20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Our kids take a road trip.
> 
> Trigger warning: references of past sexual abuse.

The desert highway unspools before them, illuminated mile by mile as Dameron lounges back in the driver’s seat while the politely beeping nav system steers west through the night, headlights sweeping across the dark landscape and bathing it in a warm glow. Finn’s examining the damage to his face in the passenger mirror, wincing as he probes his swollen eye, wearing Dameron’s leather jacket instead of his old shirt, soaked through with Mitaka’s arterial blood. Rey’s curled in the backseat beside Ben, head resting in his lap. She’s asleep. He strokes hair back from her cheek, choppy pieces falling through his fingers where Phasma’s knife clipped through the soft brown curls.

They’d left Phasma alive, unconscious in the street beside a screaming Hux. A jug of water, a few ration bars. Just enough to keep them going for a week if they’re very, very careful. Provisions to trek back to the pond on foot; working with quiet, brutal efficiency, Rey had siphoned gasoline from all the quads’ tanks and left the liquid drying in the dust. Then she’d disemboweled the bikes until she eventually found General Snoke’s tracking chips under the quads’ dashboard compasses.

“He’ll never find you,” she’d told Ben, crushing tracking chip after chip beneath her heel until only one remained. She’d handed this last chip to him on an open palm, a sacrifice and a benediction. “He’ll never hurt you again.”

He’d broken the beacon between his bare hands.

“Tell me your name,” she’d said, firm and gentle.

He’d answered her: “Ben. Just Ben.”

It’d been true. It is true.

But it hurts, this name. His mind rejects it, remembering the pain of its exorcism, cutting out the foolish weakness that was Ben Solo. It hurts with the echo of a truncheon breaking blood vessels across his shoulders, pounding submission into him so that he was glad to kneel, glad to forget—anything to make the pain stop. And it hurts because his mind is suddenly too large, too free, too full, and there’s no watcher anymore to quell his baser or his better impulses. To tell him which is which. He has to decide for himself, feel everything himself. It’s terrifying.

But he wants it. He wants this name because it will be the cry on Rey’s lips when she comes undone around his hands and cock and mouth. He wants it because he wants to be the man she thinks he is, almost more than he wants her.

 _Sergeant Ben Solo is dead_. But Ben...Ben is alive.

 _Just Ben_.

For himself, and for her. _Just Rey._

She’d been...miraculous today. Terrible and glorious. Returning for him through the hottest hell. Ready to kill. For him. She’d given him everything of herself...

Ben’s chest tightens, and Rey stirs under his clenching fingers on her cheek.

“Shhh, it’s all right,” he murmurs, and she softens back into sleep.

Neither Dameron nor Finn had protested when she’d led Ben to the retrofitted solar vehicle with bull bars and lifted wheels parked in an alleyway behind the pool hall. Ben wouldn’t have dared defy her, either—her face while she released the rattlesnake in awful, gorgeous vengeance is imprinted on the backs of his eyelids. Her remote, inhuman beauty.

He’d been afraid, watching her work, laying out the protein bars and the water, draining the quads’ gas tanks. Afraid to meet her eyes. She’d been a stranger to him then, chains broken from her rigid moral code and her marking stone, something unleashed inside her that he knows within the dark, frightened part of himself that will always be Kylo Ren. The part he fears.

Joy in pain.

But the instant she’d started through the alley toward Dameron’s vehicle, he’d followed her, a string beneath his ribs tied to hers.

Now she sleeps, and he strokes her hair, and she’s Rey again with her fluttering lips and sun-kisses scattered across her nose. _His_ Rey. But he’s still afraid, because he knows now what he’ll do to protect her. She’s the most dangerous thing in the desert for him; there’s no mountain he won’t move to shield her, no inviolate law he won’t discard, no injury he won’t gladly take in her place. She is...everything. If this is a weakness, he never wants to master it.

His fingers whisper against butterfly bandages from the First Order’s medkit that Finn’s used to clamp together the split seam across his face. It hurts, and he’s so, so grateful. This is a scar he’ll wear with fierce pride. A scar he wears for Rey.

He smoothes her hair again, his steady, gentle touch lulling them both. His head tips back against the headrest.

Sunrise wakes them to a changed landscape. The terrain is rising from the flat desert floor, creating vast plateaus and canyons of shade. Their rutted road winds between mesas and through gorges, past geologic pinnacles and stripes of pale pink and orange sediment in the exposed rock. There’s more greenery here, with sparse patches of ground cover that look like they belong on a coral reef, and spiny plants shaped like pitchforks thrusting against the sky. Cacti.

Rey presses her nose to the car’s tinted window, staring and staring. Her shoulders are tense, tendons in her neck standing out in hard bars through her skin. Then, her lips move. “I remember this.”

Ben’s eyes flit down to the pale bands of scarring on her wrists from his zipties.

Yes, _his_. He has to own this.

He can’t blame his past actions on Kylo Ren. It would be easier, putting the guilt for all the people he’s hurt on someone else. But he can’t, because Kylo Ren is still with him, huddled small in his chest— _here_. So he steels himself to remember a time when he’d forced her to tell him about a green place, a legend in an ancient language, the hope of somewhere else. They’re speeding west at a reckless pace, their fuel source burning endlessly across the sky, and he knows Rey’s afraid, afraid to cross back out of the desert and into one of the few towns for hundreds of miles showing on the car’s dashboard nav system.

They’ll be passing through Takodana.

“Stop the car,” he snaps. “Dameron, stop the _fucking_ car.”

Wheels screech and the vehicle fishtails across the asphalt before shuddering to a stop, crosswise on the road. “What the—”

But Ben’s already wrenching open his door and striding out. Rey follows him, hands knotted together and trembling.

“Sweetheart—”

“Sunshine—”

“Shut up,” Ben tells both Dameron and Finn. He leads Rey away from the car through a prickly patch of scrub brush, until the humming desert morning drowns out their voices with a buzz of waking insects and night creatures scurrying for their burrows. Then he asks her, “Rey, do you want to stop? Because we can leave right now. Take our things, and just go. You don’t have to be anywhere near Takodana ever again.”

And Rey...Rey’s glassy eyes turn to him, to the scar raking across his face, and her eyes focus like she’s looking at the damn sun. “I…” Her arms curl around her ribcage, palms cupping her elbows. “I don’t want to go back to Takodana, Ben.” She huddles inside the little cave she’s made from her own body, shivering despite the rising heat. Then she stands up straighter and meets his gaze again. “But I need to.”

“Are you sure? Because—”

“You’ll be with me,” she tells him. “I know you won’t let him hurt me any more than he—”

“You think he’s still alive? After you—”

“No. But if he is, somehow, I will kill him again,” she says quietly. Her eyes are polished steel balls.

“He can’t hurt you anymore,” he echoes her own words to him.

Rey just shakes her head at the arms he’s extended to draw her safe against his chest, at the platitude. They both know it’s a lie.

Her counting stone, her panic for every day she loses in marking her guilt against the rock.

Whoever this man is, he’s always hurting her. Ben knows what that’s like, but there’s nothing he can do about it. He wants to kill this man for her. But he can’t kill her ghost, her nightmare.

Only Rey can do that.

She gives him a short nod for their shared understanding. They return to the car, walking side by side but not touching.

“Drive,” Rey tells Dameron.

To the man’s credit, he doesn’t ask questions. He puts the rig in gear and accelerates, passing through the tablelands and rising across a range of jutting, ugly mountains, their slopes interspersed with bare, wind-scoured rock and stunted trees clinging to the steep sides with half-bared roots and gnarled branches.

 _Nevada Welcomes You!_ a bullet-ridden sign shouts in cheerful font when the engine’s whine softens to a purr at the summit.

_Las Vegas - 103 miles_

_Takodana - 127 miles_

_Pahrump - 159 miles_

They devour those one hundred twenty-seven miles in a little over an hour, and then—

 _Takodana, population 17,531_. No welcome sign.

It’s a town just large enough for a man to be anonymous, holding three girls captive in a home that’s supposed to protect them from living for drugs and sex on the street. Assaulting them. Just small enough that social services might be a satellite operation from a bigger city, driving in on Wednesdays like a fucking library book-mobile.

Empty, wind whistling against abandoned buildings, a town that’s lost its grip on a stretch of land that never wanted the scars of its roads and houses. A town like any other they might’ve passed through.

 _Tako-dana_. Green place.

The only green here is the sickly tint in Rey’s lips, eyes closed, knuckles white.

Finn makes a noise like water in a kinked garden hose, reading the sign as they pass, understanding. He swivels in the front seat, concerned and frowning at the immobile panic etched across Rey’s face. “Sunshine, this is…”

“I know,” she whispers through taut lips. She doesn’t open her eyes. “Poe, take the third right off Main Street.”

“Am I missing something—”

“Obviously,” Ben tells him.

Dameron’s eyebrows rise up his forehead, but he decelerates and makes the directed turn without comment. They drive away from what probably once passed for a nice part of town, with chain restaurants whose corporate neon logos have dulled to an indeterminate and ugly beige, a hardware store with rusted farm tools hanging from the rafters, a grungy coffee shop, a motel with every window smashed, and a couple of second-hand clothing stores.

Rey’s hands are fists in her lap, nails bloody where she’s bitten them to the quick. Her body thrums like a live wire. Ben wants to hold her, but he’s afraid she’ll shatter if he touches her. So he just sits as still as he can beside her, and waits for her to need him.

“Next left,” she whispers.

Dameron slows and eases the car into a narrow street, the pavement broken with potholes and the sidewalks interspersed with loose dirt. An old spinning clothesline twirls its rusted arms. Chain-link gapes wide from fences and over windows.

“The world ending really did a number on this place,” Dameron says, thudding through the ruts with gritted teeth since there are more holes than actual pavement at this point. Funny-man falling short, because—

“It’s always been like this,” Rey says, so quietly that only Ben can hear her. Then, louder, visibly steeling herself, “Poe, stop at the next intersection.” Her voice barely trembles.

Dameron pulls off to the roadside. Rey gets out of the car, moving stiffly, clutching her reclaimed satchel and leaving dirty smudges on the canvas from the sluggish bleeding beneath her nail beds. Ben follows, of course. But when Finn opens his door, Rey shakes her head.

 _No_.

“Rey, sunshine—”

“No,” she repeats. “Stay here, Finn.”

She doesn’t say anything to Ben as they walk up the street, skirting rotten fences leaning drunkenly over strips of sidewalk, past houses with broken windows behind grill bars or chain-link and the odd whole casement, which is worse; the unbroken panes are blind eyes, unlidded, unblinking, and watching them. He positions himself between her and the nearest windows, blocking her reflection with his.

Rey’s mouth twitches, as if she’s trying to smile through her panic at his own fanciful fear. The expression flickers and dies. She marches herself forward faster, every inch of her body speaking horror and determination. He keeps pace, angling his shoulders against the windows just the same. It’s all he can do for her right now.

They walk for one minute. Two. Five.

Then all at once, without any warning, Rey stops. She’s given no indication in her fierce march that she’s approaching her goal, just powering through until it’s as though she’s run into a wall. Her eyes squeeze shut, then open too widely, pupils blown to black, eclipsing her hazel irises.

“This is the house.”

The lot they’re standing in front of looks the same as all the other vacant premises they’ve passed. Derelict roof with a torn shred of blue tarp patching over a break in the shingling. Sagging porch. Door broken from its hinges. Windows gaping and empty. But certainty radiates off Rey’s skin, the way she trembles and fists her fingers, staring down this house with over-blown eyes.

 _Fear_.

“Rey—” He can’t help himself, reaching for her.

“Not yet.” She firms her shoulders and steps past him into the yard, walking with locked knees up rickety wooden steps to the porch, through the front door.

“Wait—”

She doesn’t. Maybe she can’t, the only way she can move being _forward_ , _through_.

Rey’s standing in a fake wood-paneled front room when he bursts into the house after her, waiting as long as she can bear before her body compels her on. Seeing him enter, she turns immediately past a rotten corduroy recliner, past stacks of moldy magazines upholding an ashtray littered with cigarette butts, past an ancient television set with a cracked, warped screen like someone put a foot through it in frustration or rage—too mangled for even the most resourceful looters to bother stealing—and past the doorway to a roach-infested kitchen. She strides toward a staircase leading up from a hallway floored with crumpled, disgusting linoleum, her feet raising dusty puffs from an oddly plush carpet on the steps.

“He put down carpeting so bruises wouldn’t show to the neighbors from where he dragged us upstairs,” she says, articulating so harshly that she spits through a terror-dry mouth; he feels an arid echo of her panic across his tongue. “To the green room.”

She turns a hard, pivoting left at the top of the stairs and marches herself down a short, grungy hallway. There’s no door to the room at the end.

“There never was,” she answers his unspoken question. “If it wasn’t our turn, he wanted us to hear.”

 _Fuck_ , she’s going to walk right into that room, right back to where it happened. This isn’t courage; it’s insanity. “You don’t have to—”

“I do.”

Peeling green wallpaper, the color just barely discernible through fading and dirt. Exposed laths. No windows—boarded over. A sour, insect-infested mattress. Bare. Rusted springs poking through. Cramped, barely nine feet by seven. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to swing a staff to break bones, to break free. It’s the most horrible place he’s ever seen. And it’s silent, but he hears...things, in the corners, in the walls.

The room remembers.

It remembers Rey.

“I’m here,” she says, her voice sudden and ringing, shattering the silence. “I’m here, and I’m alive. You couldn’t break me, Unkar Plutt. Not _before_ , and not now. I’m _alive_. And I’m here to end this.” Rey’s hand dives into her bag and she drags out her counting rock. “I’ve marked every day since I killed you. Since you made me kill my friend. My _sister_. You raped me, and starved me, and told me it was my fault. My fault that Paige and Rose are dead. But you know what? You taught me to survive. You taught me to be on my own, to trust no one. And that’s kept me alive.

“But I’m not alone anymore. I’m not alone and I don’t need you, _you bastard_. I don’t need you in my head telling me I’m worthless, that everyone around me will be just like you. I don’t need you keeping me alive by being afraid all the damn time, telling me that I’m nothing. Because I’m not. I’m not nothing. _I’m Rey, motherfucker!_ ”

She raises the palm-sized stone above her head and rushes at the sick green wallpaper, at the rotting laths. She hurls her rock against them. Decaying timbers shiver. Rey picks up the stone and throws it again. _Again_. Then she just clutches it to her chest like a battering ram and launches herself against the wall until she’s punching her fists and shoulders and knees through sheetrock, through cobwebbed insulation, through corroded plywood, tearing the foundation apart with her nails, with her teeth until she breaks the rotted room open and sunlight comes flooding in. Even then, knuckles bleeding, shoulders quivering with exhaustion, ribs heaving, she doesn’t stop until she’s fractured a human-sized opening through the wall.

“I got out,” she says through gritted teeth, panting. “ _I got out_. Now they can, too.”

There’s no wind in this stifling space, but Ben swears he feels a rush of air swirl from the corners behind him and past his face, through the hole Rey’s broken out of the green room at last.

Tendrils of hair curling over her ears stir in that same impossible current. “Goodbye, Paige. Goodbye, Rose,” she whispers. The battered stone falls from her hands. She leaves it at her feet, staring off through the opening she’s made, to the sun and the sky, her gaze tracing something rising, soaring against the horizon. “I’m sorry it took me so long.” She remains silhouetted against the light forever, watching what he can’t see—those currents flying away, witnessing a farewell—and then Rey turns back to him.

“I’m finished,” she says. What he reads in her is, _I’m forgiven_.

“You could raze the house down, tear it apart like this room,” he tells her. “With Dameron’s Gatling guns, you could make sure—”

“No.” Rey shakes her head. She takes Ben’s hand with her small, bloody one. “I’m sure. Let’s go.”

They return to the car, ignoring Finn and Dameron’s silent, potent questions. And then they leave Takodana behind.

There never was a green place, he knows. No verdant paradise untouched by the end of the world; a lesson Rey learned much faster than he did. But he’s not devastated by his knowledge. _No_. Because there’s green in her hazel eyes when she smiles, and if he can only have this green, it’s all that matters. The dream of _somewhere else_ is right beside him in the car’s backseat.

 _Yes_. _Everything. This_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're enjoying Sun, Sand, and Stone, tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.
> 
> Oooh, and [Chapter 3](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15078044/chapters/34959656) of _Rules of Engagement for Sinners and Saints_ is up!


	21. Chapter 21

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We made it, folks!

Wary of the dangers from fallen, irradiated cities, they steer onto back roads to skirt Las Vegas and Reno. Dameron’s vehicle eats up the road, and Nevada melts into California. Granite and stripped pine. Glacial lakes in the mountains, where they fill their gallon jugs with pure, icy water, watchful for attackers, animal or human, around this vital resource. They drive on, chewing a mixture of snake jerky, protein rations—Finn refuses his share—and stale packaged foods scrounged from Fancyfree. It’s amazing how many packets of chips and pretzels fall down behind or under grocery stores’ aluminum shelving and get forgotten. Old and softening inside their packages, long past the horizon of their expiration date, the pretzels are the best thing Ben’s ever tasted.

“Don’t get crumbs on the seats,” Dameron warns. As if anyone would waste something so precious as these chips by dropping them between seat cushions or wiping fingers on the leather when they could lick off the salt.

Ben snorts.

Rey smiles at him through the corner of her mouth.

Mountains descend to hills, which become the vast, open plains of an agricultural valley. Though the beeping nav system is self-sufficient on its stored solar power to keep them driving through the night while they sleep, they stake a makeshift camp for the evening in the midst of an overgrown, untended almond orchard. Stopping is a luxury, but one glance at Rey’s face, and Ben taps Dameron’s shoulder in sharp command, jerking his chin sideways toward her.

 _Look_.

She’s moaning with longing against the window, fingers tracing creamy blossoms unfurling along the trees’ branches through the car’s tinted, reinforced glass as they pass.

“We’ll have to stay in the vehicle,” Dameron says, even as he takes the car off auto-pilot and decelerates. “Must’ve been hit by radiation pretty hard, if people up and abandoned arable land with a good enough water supply for farming.”

“Fine.” Then, trying to be gracious, because Dameron didn’t have to stop, could’ve ignored him and Ben wouldn’t have been able to do a damn thing about it, he adds, “Thanks.”

Dameron raises his eyebrows and glances pointedly at Rey, then at Finn with a sigh. Finn laughs, like he’s won a bet.

“Shut up,” Ben mutters under his breath.

With the engine powered down and shadows winging across the valley from the eastern mountains, the orchard around them dissolves in the dusk from stark branches against an unforgiving, burning sky, to a pale, watercolor blur of tangled wood and white smudges of flowers on swaying twigs. It’s quiet, a peaceful breeze stirring cool air through the treetops—but if there’s been a radiation strike here, it’s deadly, too. They’ll be all right if they keep their doors and windows closed, with the filtration system that Dameron’s macgyvered over the air vents. But...

“Blossoms are coming back,” Rey says, though not as if she has any real hope of cupping the delicate blooms in her hands and inhaling their sweet, slightly nutty fragrance.

“But there aren’t any animals,” Finn answers. “If there were some squirrels, or birds…”

“And there aren’t.” Aside from the whispering wind, the orchard is eerily silent. “I know. I just...it’s...it’s been a long time since I saw anything so beautiful.”

Ben’s chest aches for the wistfulness in her voice, the yearning brightening her eyes with tears.

Rey catches him looking at her and wipes a hand beneath her nose. “I’m not crying.”

She’s been silent since leaving Takodana; he’s really put some damn effort into making conversation with Finn and Dameron instead, so they’ll let her be. Uphill work, appropriate for the mountains they’ve traversed. But they’ve gotten through the day without trading more insults than is reasonable, and no one’s been shot. It’s...okay. So far, it’s actually pretty okay.

He doesn’t like them, and they don’t like him. But they all like Rey.

Well...no, that’s not quite right, because…

 _He_ loves her.

Simple. True.

He does. It's like breathing.

And that’s also pretty fucking okay with him. Wordlessly, he offers his arms. Rey curls into them, butting her head into his chest to push him over on the car’s rear seat so they can lie down, hips flush, nose to nose while her fingers ghost over the gash on his face. He closes his eyes into the pain, into her touch. _He loves her_. He knows he’ll never say it, and neither will she, because that’s not who they are. They’re too damaged and scared for those words.

But he loves her, and she knows. It’s okay, because she let him come with her into that horrible green room in Takodana, and now she nestles into his arms with one hand on his waist and the other on his cheek like she’s coming home, and she lets him love her.

“I swear to god, if you’re fucking in my car—” Dameron curses, half-asleep beside a snoring Finn in the front seats when an argent gibbous moon crests to its peak in the sky after midnight, illuminating the almond trees and their blossoms like candles drifting through the air in frosted glass lanterns.

“We’re asleep,” Ben promises him, stroking a hand over Rey’s stomach to quiet her keening little moans while his fingers tempt her quivering thighs apart again to delve into the sweet heat between them, _coaxing, coaxing_. His blood sings, and she’s alive under his hands, so alive—

“J-just...good dreams,” Rey gasps into his mouth.

“Jesus Christ,” Dameron says. “Finn, darlin’, can you ratchet up the volume, please?”

They’re heavy-eyed and sore from their cramped positions in the morning. Dameron’s being more obnoxious than usual, keeping up a barrage of loud and innuendo-laden commentary with Finn, who’s confused but game, having slept through the night like a damn jet engine. But then Rey gives Ben a sheepish smile, a little shy and a little satisfied when Dameron makes some comment about filth in his nice clean car—gesturing at dirt on the floor mats and greasy fingerprints on the windows with a pointed look at Ben—so maybe Dameron’s not quite as much of a bastard as he’s thought? Irritating as all hell, obviously, laughing out the side of that pretty-boy mouth. But Rey’s giving him that little smile, so maybe the short fucker’s actually kind of okay.

The car— _BB-8_ , Dameron corrects him with a smirk, and _did you know I rigged a backwards-facing camera from the dash so no one gets a jump on me from the backseat?_ —charges its power cells to capacity in the glaring morning sun, and then they leave the almond orchard to a slow healing, crossing the wasted central valley with its desiccated rice fields and dusty, abandoned fruit stands next to the highway, offering faded promises of bargain-price strawberries, peaches, cherries, or avocados. They climb again into a new range mountains.

“If the nav system’s right, we’ll get enough elevation to see the Pacific in about an hour,” Dameron says.

“The ocean?” Rey breathes, a shuddering sound.

“And then what’s the plan?” Ben asks.

Dameron exchanges a look with Finn. He tries to catch Rey’s eye, but she’s craning past him between the driver and passenger seats, straining for a glimpse of that tantalizing water. She dreams of it, but she’s never seen the ocean, Ben remembers. Her gaze is brilliant and distant and glistening. _All the water in the world_.

“That...depends,” Dameron answers him.

On Rey. Rey, who’s forgotten them all for a moment, yearning for a hint of purest blue. But then her eyes snap back into focus. “We keep going,” she says. Certain and strong. “We go to the edge of the earth, and we see what’s there.”

 _We_.

Their first view of the Pacific comes just after noon, when BB-8 crests a fog-shrouded hill and begins a descent into a sudden blaze of sun. The light is vivid, blinding, reflecting off an endless swell of water spreading out below them. Emerald waves breaking above pale sand meet the cerulean of deeper tides where the shore slopes off into a subterranean channel, darkening to black where the ocean’s too deep even to reflect the sky. The shore is pitted with boulders, and rocks dipping out into the sea are craggy and cruel, dashing apart waves seeking the safety of sand and calmer surf with thrashes of spray thrown up against a brilliant firmament. The destruction is magnificent. From the shore’s violence, water stretches to the horizon with deceptive calm, barely fluttering against the earth’s curve where it disappears, singing its siren song of _somewhere else_ … _somewhere else_...

“ _Oh_.” Leather creaks under Rey’s fingers from where she’s gripping the seat. Her eyes are wide against the sun. Her pupils should be pinpricks from such searing light, but they’re dilated instead, feasting on the sight of the sea, devouring it. So reckless, so defiant, so beautiful. “I didn’t know there was this much green in the whole galaxy.”

Grinning, Dameron shifts BB-8 out of auto-pilot and navigates them along a turning marked with a dingy sign for _Highway 1_. Narrow and winding, its asphalt broken by sliding hillsides and fallen rock, the road curls down from bracken-covered hills that gleam with an oily purple hue in the sunlight, and to the ocean shore.

Everything is so new to Rey. She twists, and cranes her neck, and scrambles across Ben’s lap to keep the sea in view along the coiling, tortuous road.

He grunts at her knee landing perilously close to his groin, and she swats him across the shoulder without looking at him, hazel irises drilling into the surging water below them as though she’ll inhale it through sight alone. He’s a little annoyed that she’s ignoring him—he’s trying not to be so damn petty, but he’s got years of experience with pissy behavior, and he’s only just beginning to learn to bask in her happiness without any expectation of return—but then she fists a hand in his shirt and tugs, bouncing with her nose pressed to the glass, and she asks,

“Ben, are we there yet?”

Just like that, he...melts.

 _Ben. We_. Asking him to tell her what she’s too rattled and excited to see for herself. Trusting him to know. _Together_.

“Yeah,” he pulls her down into his lap with his arms around her squirming ribcage and buries his face in her hair so Dameron and Finn won’t see him crying—she’ll feel the tears; he wants her to—and he tells her, “we’re here.”

BB-8 rolls to a stop, wheels turning over drifts of sand blown onto the road’s asphalt, and Dameron cuts the engine.

A moment of silence, and then—“Seals!” Finn’s pointing out the window, all but hammering his fists against the glass at dark orbs bobbing just past the waves’ surf line. “Look, sunshine, look—”

They _could_ be seals—animals returning to the area as radiation levels taper and fall; Ben wipes his eyes on his cuff, squinting past Rey’s bunned hair—or the blobs could be rotting kelp heads, fried with a lethal dose in air blown down from San Francisco or up from Los Angeles on the stiff sea draughts.

Rey doesn’t wait to find out. She’s out of Ben’s lap and out of the car in an instant, breezes tugging at her clothes and her hair. If they’re soaked with radiation, she’ll be dead in an hour. She’s running along a wind-swept dune, down toward the water, boots slipping on the sliding sand, stumbling, and she’s laughing.

“ _Fuck_ , Rey—” He follows her in a mad dash, to hell with the radiation.

“Ben, look! They’re alive, they’re all alive!”

One of the blobs disappears under shifting, swirling foam as a wave rises and breaks. It’s silhouetted against a rolling green wall of water crashing down across the surf line, rushing inland toward the rocky shore where Rey stands vibrating on the damp sand, hands outstretched to cup the wind gusting against her body off the ocean.

It has flippers.

Ben collapses onto his knees beside her, breathing roughly like he’s been kicked in the chest. _Thank fuck. Thank fuck_. Rey’s going to be the death of him. She’s so reckless when she’s trusting, and he hates that she could get hurt, and he loves that she’s temerarious because she knows he’ll catch her before she falls—

She drags him up, pointing further out to sea, laughing a touch too high and quick, giddy and balanced on some precipice that he can’t see. “Ben—I think that’s a whale! Look, there’s its spout! Everything! Just look at it! It’s all alive! And Ben...we’re alive…” But then all at once, she’s grabbing onto his jacket and burying her face against his chest, and she’s suddenly sobbing so hard she’s choking, pounding her clenched fists into him.

“Rey, what the—”

“I-I thought...you were going t-t-t-to die back there in t-that horrible t-t-town—w-without knowing that I—”

“Rey—”

“—and what if I c-couldn’t save you? I couldn’t have lived with mys-s-self if you’d—”

“ _Rey!_ ”

She runs out of breath for her self-flagellation, thank god. While she gulps for air, Ben tilts up her chin, forcing her to look at him. To see him as he wants her to see him. Her tears fill his palm.

“I was never going to die there,” he tells her, willing her to understand. “Do you know why?”

Rey shakes her head and tries to look away from him, away from the ugly slash bisecting his face, but he firms his fingers around her chin, holding her to his gaze. Her eyes widen and she fights him for one instinctive second, but then she grows very still and softens under his hands. Transfixed. Her eyes trace the angry red wound and her lips flutter.

“Do you remember what I told you in the dugout? What I promised?”

“You...you said…”

“I didn’t say. _I promised_. What did I promise you?”

“That...that you’d never let anyone hurt me again.” Her voice strengthens, abruptly accusatory, eye flashing. Good, she’s fighting back. “You promised! And then you—”

“Would it have hurt you if I’d ended up dead?”

She draws in an outraged breath that wracks her from shoulders to toes, and she raises a hand, prepared to slap him. “How can you ask me that? How _dare_ you—of course it—”

“So I didn’t die,” he tells her, as simply as he can. And it _is_ simple. “I promised I wouldn’t let anyone hurt you, and that includes me. I _promised_ , and I’ll keep on promising until you believe me, and until you smack me around if I ever fucking disappoint you. I’m going to disappoint you, Rey. I’ll try not to, but I know I already have in so many ways, without even meaning to—and that’s worse! It tore me apart to watch you walk into that room in Takodana, knowing that I couldn’t protect you—” He’s meant to reassure her with this speech, but the guilt just spills out, and he can’t stop it, can’t stop himself—

Rey’s finger crosses his lips, and he is stone. It’s the first time she’s touched him this way, with neither anger nor lust nor desperation, but just as though his lips are the obvious place for her finger to be in this moment. It means _everything_. “You did protect me, Ben.”

“But—”

“You stood beside me when I couldn’t stand alone. I couldn’t have faced that place by myself. I couldn’t have saved myself if you hadn’t—”

“But I still couldn’t—”

“I didn’t want you to save me, Ben,” she tells him, dry-eyed now and so fierce. “That wasn’t for you to do. You gave me what I needed, so that _I_ could do what I had to do for myself. You stood with me, and I wasn’t alone.”

He whispers a new vow against her fingertips, drawn from the depths of his soul, such a small thing to offer her that he’s almost ashamed—it’s nothing grand and majestic like his first promise—but it’s everything he has to give, and it’s hers. “You won’t ever be alone, Rey. I promise.”

And his heart damn near explodes, because she smiles up at him and says, “Neither will you.”

There’s the smack of very slow clapping behind him, shattering the moment just as he’s leaning in to seal his lips over that blinding smile and every one of her sun-kisses.

“That’s damn cute,” Poe Goddamn-eron says, still applauding with a shit-eating grin that Ben _hears_ in his voice, walking down the dunes from the highway with a sliding Finn in tow, who yelps as he stubs a toe on a rock or a whelk or what-the-fuck ever.

Ben turns with immense reluctance to take the brunt of that grin, tucking Rey in against his side in a pitiful instinct to protect her; the smile’s worse than he’s anticipated, Dameron looking them up and down and just _smirking_. Even the fierceness of Rey’s scowl at the interruption doesn’t phase the bastard—probably because her frown keeps sliding into a smile of her own. Which makes the whole thing not only more bearable than embarrassingly, but pretty damn great.

“Eyes up here!” Dameron orders him, pointing to his own face. “Eye-fuck her later. And boy, am I glad I won’t have to listen to you two _actually_ fucking out your feelings on each other in my car again. Because I dunno if either of you noticed while you were making eyes—as the kids say—” (Ben’s very sure no kid has ever said this) “—at each other and the seals, but there’s a—”

“Boat!” Finn cuts him off, looking up from rubbing his stubbed toe to point down the beach.

“Thanks for ruining the build-up, buddy.” Dameron cuffs the back of Finn’s head, a little hard and plenty affectionate. “But yeah, there _is_ a boat.”

Ben wants to say something useful so Dameron and Finn won’t think he’s a total twit—wait, when has he started caring?—but his brain’s in a tailspin, pulse hopping on a cocktail of joy and desire, and he’s feeling damn moronic, because all he wants to do is kiss Rey senseless and then fuck her right where they stand, with the wind in their hair and frigid water spilling around their ankles as the tide comes in.

“Uh…” he tries, “can you...can you drive—”

“Pretty sure the term is _steer_. And I’m a _pilot_ , man.”

There is a boat. If Rey hadn’t been so obsessed with the seals, and Ben hadn’t been so obsessed with her, they would’ve seen it—a fishing rig with trawling lines spread and floating aimlessly in the tide. One of the nets has caught fast on a salt-slicked rock covered in barnacles and bird shit about one hundred yards offshore. Anchored there by perilous chance, the boat bobs in the surf, just within swimming distance.

“Probably got swept outta a harbor somewhere along the coast when a tidal wave hit, or something.” Finn fists his hands over his eyes, cutting the sea’s glare with makeshift binoculars. “Nobody home, that’s for sure. And it’s beat up a bit, but it’s gotta still be watertight if it’s floating after all this time.”

Dameron grins. “We’re gonna do this.”

The plan falls into place like this has been their endgame since meeting in Fancyfree’s squalid little pool hall.

“Retrofit the engine for solar power with BB-8’s tiles—”

“...can make a sun still with some dark cloth and a plastic wrapper from the chips, or empty water jugs...”

“Bullets for lures—”

“Ben—”

“Yeah, fish like stuff that’s shiny—”

“...enough supplies to last us while we figure out how to make a harpoon…”

“Finn, I—”

“Rey’s staff could probably be—”

“Poe...”

“Hang on, I wonder if we could use my shotgun for propelling her staff—”

“ _I can’t swim!_ ”

Sudden silence.

Then—“You never learned to swim?” Dameron blinks at Rey. “But didn’t your…”

“Stop that sentence right there, Dameron.” There’s no way in hell Ben’s going to make Rey explain that no, her parents didn’t take her to swimming lessons because she had no goddamn parents, because that would mean explaining what happened in Takodana, and that’s not fucking happening on his watch.

Not until she’s ready.

“Rey,” he says to her. She looks up at him with a worried little frown between her eyebrows. God, she thinks she’s a burden right now, doesn’t she? _No, no, no_. “It’s fine that you don’t swim yet. I can help you get out to the boat today, and then you’ll have as much time as you want to learn while we’re sailing. Will you let me?”

She swallows, eyes flickering to Finn and Dameron. To the crashing tides and the cold, lovely sea. She nods.

“Okay, good.”

She walks stiffly, staying close beside Ben while they collect their gear from BB-8 and strip the vehicle down for useful parts for life on the boat. Water jugs, rations, weapons, sleeping bags and blankets. And Finn’s ridiculous toothbrush, purloined about a thousand years ago from the First Order’s medkit.

“Who’s gonna share?” He brandishes the implement at Ben. “Me and Poe, or you and Rey?”

“That is so disgusting,” Dameron tells him.

“What? It’s not like we’re not sharing saliva anyway—”

“And...you just made it worse,” Ben says.

Dameron grins. Right at Ben. Who grins back.

 _Okay_.

The toothbrush question’s left unresolved, but they’re all satisfied. _Yeah_ , Ben thinks again when Dameron hands him a wrench _, okay._ They pry spikes from the vehicle’s wheels to tip a harpoon, and peel off solar patches from the roof and hood. Dameron gives a long-suffering sigh before ripping out the rear seat, splitting his precious leather and doing more damage than Ben and Rey ever did.

“Flotation device,” he says, stroking the cracked finish with exaggerated regret. “It’ll help keep our guns dry and take full water jugs out to the boat.”

They haul their goods back along the dunes, tie down the weapons and jugs with their belts and the buckled straps from Rey’s satchel, and then push the makeshift raft out into the water. At Ben’s side, Rey winces at the chilly froth, at the unfamiliar feel of sand swishing between her bare toes.

“It was warmer in my dreams,” she mutters. “Ugh.”

“You’re going to be just fine,” he promises her.

With the seat floating low in the water, he, Finn, and Dameron remove their boots and guide it out between them, kicking off from the seafloor and steering their vital cargo toward the boat. Briny spray stings the slashed wound on Ben’s face; he grimances, but saltwater’s probably a good disinfectant, right? He grits his teeth and keeps swimming. Though the sea is cold, they move slowly to avoid upsetting the raft, shepherding it through ripples in the ocean that will become waves back on the beach. Rey waits behind on the shore where those waves crest over her feet, shivering, arms crossed. Ben hates leaving her even like this, but they have to get their gear safely onboard; six hands are steadier than four.

And he doesn’t want to be distracted when he takes her into the water.

The fishing vessel’s sides loom up, a flaking name painted on the bow half-obliterated with bouquets of clinging muscles spelling out _Antioch 2_. Only the name’s second half is really legible. Shoving off from the raft, Dameron scales a set of slippery footholds built into the hull. He disappears for a moment, then comes back to the rail with a large square of netting, into which Ben and Finn load their gear; fully waterlogged beneath the weight it’s carried, the car’s backseat is too heavy to heave out of the sea and onto the boat. They’ll have to let it sink. Finn climbs up to join Dameron in hauling the net aboard. Ben kicks off from boat, back toward the shore.

Despite being out of practice, he’s a fast swimmer with his powerful shoulders and thighs. He joins Rey on the sand within a few minutes.

“Everything okay on the boat?” she asks, playing for casual while he drips puddles onto the sand from his clothes and hair.

“We’ll take the grand tour when we get there. They should’ve gotten everything decorated by the time we arrive. Dameron’s probably too short to hang pictures at the right height, though.”

He wins a weak smile from her. A little victory.

“You ready?”

Again, Rey swallows. Again, she nods.

“All right.” He extends a hand, which she takes. Then, before she can protest, he scoops an arm under her knees and another under her shoulders, lifting her against his chest while he wades backwards out into the sea. “See? You’re already floating.”

“Put me down—”

He does immediately, laying her out tenderly in the water, facing the shore.

“Ugh, that’s cold!” She squirms and clings to his shoulders, greedy for heat from his body.

The pressure of her hands forces his head under. He surfaces, sputtering and grinning against the sting tracing his gashed cheek. He pulls back against her palms on his arms, drawing her with him as he kicks away from the beach. He can’t reach the seafloor anymore; Rey hasn’t realized this. Teeth chattering, she’s calm enough. Ben kicks again, propelling them further out, shifting her in his arms so that he’s holding her ribcage just beneath her breasts. Her spine presses against his stomach for a moment, before drifting up as natural buoyancy in her body and the surrounding saltwater helps her float.

“This okay?” he asks her. Another kick. Another. A quick check over his shoulder to right his navigation backwards through the ocean, aiming again for the boat when he’s drifting off-course with Rey’s squirming.

She nods, snorting when she inhales water up her nose. Her features make an interesting contortion before she sprays the water out again. “Are you laughing at me?” she sputters.

“I’m trying not to.”

Unexpectedly, she turns over in his arms and smiles. “That’s okay. I like it when you laugh.” But then her eyes widen and her body tenses, losing buoyancy as her muscles contract, dipping her chin under the sea’s surface. Panic flares over her face at the water lapping against her lips. “Ben, we’re r-really far away from the—”

“Halfway there,” he assures her. “You’re doing great.”

“I’m scared,” she whispers.

“I know. Rey, you don’t have to swim if you don’t want to. You can just float. Will you let me help you float?”

“Ok-kay.” Her voice is high and small.

“Can you turn onto your back?” She manages the roll, thrashing, elbows close to her body, lowering her center of gravity, pulling her down in the water. “Good,” he praises her, stroking his hands down her shoulders to loosen them. “Now spread your arms and legs.” She tries, splayed on the surface while he tows her gently through the sea, ripples around her limbs catching the sunlight so that she’s outlined and glowing in his arms.

“L-like a seastar?”

“Just like a seastar.” Ben presses a wet kiss to her forehead. Rey doesn’t sink at the light pressure by putting down her legs or sagging her stomach, instead letting him ease her head back with the softness of his mouth. “That’s perfect, Rey.”

He floats them both through the water, kicking steadily under her body, propelling them along, checking his position every now and then against the fishing vessel until they bump lightly up against the hull. Rey startles at the sudden change, sinking immediately so that Ben grabs her around the waist and hauls her up against his chest. She clings to him like a barnacle, like a seastar.

“You did great, Stingrey,” he tells her. “Reystar?”

“Don’t you ever call me those things again.” She glares, panting, half-loosening her hold like she’s going to smack him.

He grins at her. “Just Rey, then.”

Dameron and Finn help them over the boat’s railing and onto the deck. They huddle together under Rey’s blanket, shivering each other’s shivers while the others explain the vessel’s layout—cabins, fighting deck and chair, observatory...Ben’s not really listening while they enthusiastically explain their ridiculous good luck, with the engine already primed and a galley-style kitchen stocked with non-perishables...

He folds Rey in against him, resting his chin on the crown of her head while her arms tighten around his waist. A tiny rough ridge from her scalp’s stitches tickles his skin. “Where do you want to go?” he asks her.

He feels her smile, and then she leans back into his hands to meet his gaze. Sunlight flashes golden in her eyes, and for an instant, his reflection is golden, too. Rey brushes a lock of sopping hair over his ear with terrifying tenderness and tells him,

“Everywhere.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so, so much for riding out this rubbish journey with me! It means the world to see your kudos and comments. :)
> 
> If you enjoyed Sun, Sand, and Stone, tell me about it in the comments/with kudos/shares with friends, and on [Tumblr](https://black-eyed-suzannah-q.tumblr.com/)! 
> 
> Or just tell me things. I like things.
> 
> (In other news, [Chapter 4](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15078044/chapters/34959833) of _Rules of Engagement for Sinners and Saints_ is up!)


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